Metalinguistic cultures, relations between languages and oral/written relations: teaching languages of schooling at primary school

Abstract

In this paper, we come back to diffferent field studies we have done in conventional as well as in bilingual Subsaharan schools over the years. We seek to analyse the effects of unequal representations of national languages and French, and those of a metalinguistic culture mainly based upon French alone, when it goes about working on the L2 as L2 and taking bi-plurilingualism into account. We analyse significant moments of teacher-pupil interactions, in order to find out whether learning is allowed, or hinderd, or even blocked by given teaching practices. We then suggest some implications of the analysed phenomena to improve learning, as regards both young learners and teacher training, which should help teachers take bi-plurilingualism into account.