Abstract EN:

The grammatical and syntaxic study of six hundred and fifty eight written productions of pupils belonging to the six-seven age group, collected lengthwise over a period of four school terms, can bring to light a number of features in the first written productions concerning the expression range during the observation period. Furthermore, the study partly reveals how the corpus keeps behindhand with the performance of educated adults and even well bellow the standards of basic french. One is working here on the assumption that the ultimate chances to pass the general certificate of education are un direct ratio with the recurrent use of certain grammatical and syntaxic features during the observation period. With this regard, a differential analysis of the corpus will enable us to divide the considered language features into three categories : statistically undifferentiating features, these are the most numerous; statistically differentiating features unconnected with school results; statistically differentiating features connected with success in the general certificate of education. The last division is chiefly concerned with propriety at sentence level, with the frequency of sentences with circumstantial subordinate clauses, with syntaxic variety and syntaxic phenomena at inter-sentence of textual level. The school system should be able to dedicate itself to the task of getting a vast majority of learners to master that cluster of differentiating writing skills.