A symposium on teaching and learning grammar

This text is part of the special Acfas Congress booklet

Progress is such in linguistics and didactics that researchers now know how to teach grammar effectively. “But this knowledge has to get to teachers and students! says Priscilla Boyer, professor of education at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières.

It is for this reason that Priscilla Boyer is co-organizer of the colloquium Teaching and learning grammar: an inventory of research in French didactics, which will be held as part of the Acfas Congress, on May 12 and 13. The event, now in its second edition, brings together researchers who study the teaching of grammar, and will focus on three axes: the learner, teaching practices and teacher training.

“We talk a lot about students’ difficulties with grammar, but we talk less about teachers’ difficulties with this subject,” says Florent Biao, professor of French didactics at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi and co-organizer of the symposium.

grammatical science

The teaching of French is at the same time necessary, very difficult and very discriminating, and this is why didacticians want to better equip teachers.

“I’m not throwing stones at anyone, but it’s complicated, the grammar. We are trying to teach children a complex, esoteric object. A verb doesn’t work in the street,” explains Priscilla Boyer, who will herself give a presentation based on her study of participle agreement. “My presentation will be limited to the question of the adjective, but I studied the results of a school service center [CSS] complete. Less than half of secondary 5 students have mastered its use. »

Florent Biao was interested in the representations and practices of teaching French in Saguenay. This study allowed her to compare what female teachers (they are mostly women) say they do in terms of teaching methods and what they actually do. He found a pretty big gap between the two. “In fact, their conception of grammar and their way of teaching it are rather traditional, and quite far from what is recommended by didactics. »

“Such a symposium is an opportunity for discussion, because we don’t always agree, necessarily, says Florent Biao. Research is progressing, but it is not always consensual. »

To put an end to the sacrosanct dictation

There is, however, one thing on which most didacticians agree and which is somewhat the subtext of the symposium: the teaching of French suffers from a certain number of fetishes and preconceived ideas which sometimes go back to several centuries and which are even antipedagogical — on dictation, on the fixity of language, on the beauty of grammatical complexity.

“I’m always amazed at what I hear,” said Priscilla Boyer. This is not the subject of our symposium, but the reflection on what we teach, the orthographic and grammatical standards, remains to be done. »

Among the problematic representations that didacticians question is the attachment to traditional dictation, the pedagogical ineffectiveness of which has long been demonstrated. Priscilla Boyer, who herself had to overcome severe dyslexia aggravated by inadequate teaching, explains that dictation is not even a valid means of assessment. Traditional dictation is a performance tool, whereas the school should aim for the transfer of knowledge.

What works, she explains, is “zero fault dictation”. It is read aloud, but it is intended for discussion. The teacher leads the students to ask themselves the questions aloud during the process: what is this word? How do we write that? “We encourage the children to do the right thing. This kind of dictation pushes young people to think, adds Florent Biao. It directs the pupils towards a more or less correct spelling. »

Get out of the ivory tower

The two-day symposium will end with comments from a great witness, Carolyne Labonté, who is an educational advisor at the CSS des Chênes in Drummondville. “Our first allies are precisely the educational advisers of the schools, who support the teachers”, says Priscilla Boyer.

Florent Biao admits that he sometimes has to overcome some resistance from teachers. “As a former teacher, I understand them. We don’t like a professor in his ivory tower watching us from above. »

This is also why the participants of the symposium advocate research-action and research-training, or what Florent Biao calls “collaborative didactic engineering”. “I talk about engineering because it takes their constraints into account and I talk about collaboration because the teachers are involved in the work of the researcher. The study itself becomes an opportunity for knowledge transfer. »

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