(en) How to explain the variation of the standards of success in heterogeneous school contexts? Such is the starting point of the definition of the problems approached in our PhD research. Lived by the teachers like a problematic diversity, linguistic and cultural heterogeneity is indeed often presented like an explanatory factor of the “school French failure”. Regarding the immigrant offspring pupils, often introduced like emblematic of heterogeneity (Caitucoli, 2003), various investigations (inter) national of scale (PISA 2000, OECD 2006, Jacobs, Rea, Teney, Callier & Lothaire, 2009, e.a.) showed that their school situation is alarming, in particular with regard to their French competences. Various factors play a dominating part in the explanation of the serious problem which these school performances pose: they are related with the socio-economic statute of the families of the pupils initially, with the language spoken at home then and finally with the type of attended teaching. These parameters are not enough however to explain all the differences observed between the school performances of the native pupils and those of the immigrant offspring pupils. It remains a share of unexplored that it falls to us to clear. Several assumptions are formulated to explain it and the one which we favor relates to representation effects. More precisely, to question the effects of the representations on the process of teaching/training in French class constitutes, according to us, a mode of comprehension of the difficulties which block it, in particular with regard to the access to the school norm. In the case of the immigrant offspring pupils, the representations of the teachers can build in relation to two orders of factors, one sociolinguistic and the other ethnic one. Initially, the sociolinguistic situations of the pupils (in relation to the statute of French, being possibly different according to cases) can generate representations in inadequacy with their linguistic practices and their possibilities of access to the legitimate norm. Moreover, the context is marked by a spreading ethnicisation of the perception of school realities, as well by the teachers as by their pupils (Rinaudo, 1999; Rochex, 2000, Felouzis and al, 2005). The approach adopted to answer the above-mentioned questioning is declined in two times: 1/ by the means of a primarily quantitative approach in four classes of 5E general secondary education, contrasted from the socioethnic viewpoint in a first phase of the field investigation, which was held from September to December ; 2/ from January to June, the exploration of the questions brought up by the first phase of the field investigation was qualitative and was examined through case studies undertaken in parallel in two of the four classes of the first sample selected, starting from the results obtained by the pupils to a test of language and nature of the linguistic requirements expressed by the French teachers during this making.
El Karouni, S. (2010). Les compétences en français d’élèves “issus de l’immigration” : une conséquence des effets de représentation ? https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/48258