Abstract EN:

This study in experimental didactics is centred on the early stage of literacy in children of five to six years of age at school in france in the final year of nursery school (kindergarden) and the first year of primary school. Based on the general hypothesis that producing meaningful text increases learners' understanding of both the way language works and its technical vocabulary, as well as helping them to move from oral to written language and to acquire the phono-graphic code, six experiments were undertaken in schools. The experimental protocol was similar in each situation : tests were first administered in invented spelling, language consciousness, sentence reading, familiarity with books and text recall. Two or three groups of five to eight children (experimental group, control group) were selected according to the following crieria : ratio of girls and boys in each group, equivalency of initial performance in groups, heterogeneous levels within each group. Didactic interventions carried out by the researcher, lasting 30 to 45 minutes per session and per group (from six to 25 sessions depending on the experiment) concerned the production of captions for pictures dictated to the adult, followed by the reading or the copying of same, the search for written units in a text in order to constitute sentences, the elaboration of tree-structures of sentences, the enunciation and encoding of the day's sentences. The first two experiments revealed a noteworthy progression of all children participating in the didactic sessions, but did not result in significant differences in performance between the two groups in invented spelling, language consciousness and reading. However, the other four experiments did reveal that the experimental group progressed further than the control group in familiarity with books, sentence reading, writing,language consciousness and text recall. These significant results, reflected by non-parametric statistical tests, confirm our initial hypothesis according to which young children introduced to the production of meaningful text build, more than do those simply introduced to reading and to the graphic aspect of writing, numerous competencies necessary for success in school.