Plurilinguisme en milieu scolaire : comment favoriser les langues des élèves et la circulation des savoirs ?
Plurilinguism at School: Promoting the Use of Home Languages for a Better Circulation of Knowledges

Summary/Abstract: This article relates the implementation of plurilingual activities in a French junior high school receiving numerous non-native speakers. Our aim was to promote multilinguism and plurilinguism within the classroom, as keys to academic success.Various reasons led to this project. Firstly, the promotion of linguistic diversity fits in the language ecological concern (Calvet 1999). Secondly, these kinds of experiences stimulate the access to linguistic and cultural otherness. In terms of individual skills, it means welcoming the teenagers not only as students, but also as plurilingual speakers with their own linguistic experience. By emphasizing the use of their home languages as a cognitive tool, the students feel that they are accepted and respected in their new school community (Cummins 2012). During the FSL (French as a Second Language) lessons, students exchange and produce collective and individuals texts, posters, and crafts relying freely on their home languages, and sometimes using other languages of the group – whether French or the language of another student. These activities were inspired by the Pluralistic Approaches (Candelier 2007). This article presents practical and specific examples. These productions are then displayed in the school to highlight the students’ plurilingual skills. This exhibition enables to lay a stress on our school’s specific involvement in a linguistic diversity promoting process. created. All the students, whether native or non-native French speakers, can share games and activities in different languages. Various actors of the school community also introduce their own home languages. This helps conveying the message that plurilinguism is not specific to the students only. Thus, all the participants move to and fro, from the position of experienced speaker to the position of unexperienced listener and speaker. The usual interactional pattern – from the teacher to the students – turns into an exchange of equally-shared knowledges. Also, peer learning and peer working lead to an improvement of the collective work, and more qualitative interactions between all the members. For the students experiencing these kinds of activities, this also induces the expansion of their mastery of their home languages, including in literary practices (Cummins 2001, 2004) which also enables them to improve in the learning of the second language. By creating a reassuring linguistic environment, the students can experience a sense of empowerment (Cummins 2012) – and so can the teacher. Practicing their home language within the classroom meets the students’ emotional, cognitive and interpersonal needs. In fact, if their home languages are not felt as being in a competition or opposition with the language of education, the students will get involved and seize the educational contents much more easily.

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