6533b838fe1ef96bd12a46c8

RESEARCH PRODUCT

L'apprentissage/enseignement de la morphologie écrite du nombre en français

subject

description

In written French forms play an essential role. Numerous morphological marks have no correspondence in oral French. This is the case of plural flexions : -s for the plural of nouns and adjectives and -nt for verbs at the third person of indicative present. Earlier research showed that on the one hand the interpretation of these marks precedes their production and that this nominal flexion proceeding appears earlier and more correctly than adjectival flexion proceeding and verbal flexion (-nt). On the other hand, overgeneralizations were tracked down thanks to this research work : faultly use of flexions especially nominal flexions attributed to verbs (ils timbres). But in these investigations learning conditions were not controlled. The survey presentea in this article checks whether children acquisition of plural knowledge from the first to the third level of primary school is easier when rules of agreement are directly taught instead of being learnt through continuous contact with written language (control group). It also checks whether learning is more efficient when subjected to explicit assessment (groups with feedback). Results show that direct instruction and drills quickly transform performances, increasing the frequency of right agreement in numbers for all grammatical categories.