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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2015

Bilingual school children’s speeches on their literacy activities

Résumé

Attaining literacy is a major milestone in human development with ramifications for success in school and general quality of life (Datta, 2000). This paper aims to consider bilingual school children’s speeches on literacy practices in the perspective of Hornberger’s (1989) interrelated continua of biliteracy development. The study deals with bilingual children in Mayotte, a former French colonial possession in the Indian Ocean, where 7 languages are spoken being the official and the only school language. While previous research on Mayotte mainly focused on language use and repertoire of school children (Laroussi & Liénard, 2011) or on teachers’ attitudes towards language use in classrooms (Laroussi, 2009), children’s speech during their literacy practice is rarely investigated. Due to insufficient proficiency in French, school failure is a real problem in Mayotte. Compared to results of the French mainland, pupils in Mayotte show significant differences in a negative way on 5th grade National Achievement Assessments. Politicians and teachers agree that this failure is related to the deep inequalities that these children encounter. Upon starting school, children are submerged into an education system where French is the medium of instruction often without any prior knowledge of French. In Mayotte, local languages have no written form; and consequently, children are multilingual in spoken language but monolingual in the written language, that being French. In the framework of our research project on educational and language policies in Mayotte, we designed a short questionnaire (socio-economic background, use of languages within and outside the home), a written evaluation of a reading test and a semi-guided interview (on literacy practices in out of school activities). We collected data from 225 multilingual school children attending 6th and 7th grades (mean age: 12 years-old). The purpose of our paper is to present the analyses of the semi-guided interviews we did with 7 of the participants. This data allows us to answer the following questions: 1. What kind of literacy experiences do bilingual children have outside school? 2. What is the relationship between language, culture and literacy? 3. What are the characteristics of these bilinguals, their environments, the contexts in which they receive instruction, and the nature of this instruction with regard to reading and writing activities? 4. What resources do they access, what literacy practices do they engage in on their own? On the basis of descriptive statistics, a global description of the findings was made. These findings aim to help in the development of social structures and pedagogical approaches targeted at improving bilinguals' motivation to engage in conventional literacy activities, thus contributing to their success beyond schooling in the context of multilingual Mayotte.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-02367208 , version 1 (17-11-2019)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-02367208 , version 1

Citer

Mehmet-Ali Akinci, Régine Delamotte. Bilingual school children’s speeches on their literacy activities. International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015, Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech, Sep 2015, La Canée, Crète, Greece. ⟨hal-02367208⟩
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