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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2015

Multilingualism in French Guiana as a resource for teaching and learning

Résumé

In this paper we will discuss a major issue in French Guiana: the way the French educational system validates or invalidates the multilingualism that characterizes primary school children aged from 3 to 10 years. Cases in point are mother tongues (Indigenous languages, Creoles languages, European languages, etc.). A good majority of children (being French citizens or children of migrants) in this oversea department grow up without being in contact with French, the official language and major language of education. But French policy tends to eschew all languages other than standard French in the public domain (Migge & Léglise, 2010). Since 20 years, however, the French education system has started to introduce some of the pupils' mother tongues but for different aims and with different functions or status. Therefore, many languages are in contact in the classroom : the pupils' mother tongues and school languages. But this multilingualism is rarely considered as an asset for teaching or learning, and the official discourses tend to prohibit the use of these languages simultaneously in teaching. Institutional representatives often state that there should be a clear separation (spatial, temporal) between the languages, and that code-switching should not appear in classroom interactions. However, in everyday interactions, it seems that teachers, even if their discourse tends to be the same as the official one, do code-switch, and that the children mother tongues are often used in the classroom either by the children or by the teachers or other participants in classroom interactions. Thus code-switching appears to be a multilingual resource in the classroom. In order to understand this gap between discourses and practices concerning code-switching, ou analysis will be based on political and institutional discourses (interviews), on the discourses and the practices (recordings) of the teachers. Based on these analysis we will show that code-switching, and multilingualism in general, could be thought as a pedagogical resource for teaching and learning.
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Dates et versions

halshs-00959638, version 1 (14-03-2014)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-00959638 , version 1

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Sophie Alby, Isabelle Léglise. Multilingualism in French Guiana as a resource for teaching and learning. Urban Multilingualism and Education, Mar 2013, Ghent, France. pp.20. ⟨halshs-00959638⟩
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