Difficultés orthographiques d’apprenants débutants plurilingues en Français Langue Seconde

Abstract

Although the French orthographic system has been the subject of numerous studies highlighting some of its inherent complexity, researchers in Applied Linguistics rarely rely on these results to establish the areas of difficulty for French as a Foreign or Second Language learners. Our research aims to understand the challenges of an adult audience (n = 20) as they enter the French orthographic system (first 20 hours of A1 level). We relied on the multi-system approach of Catach (1995), to which we added phonetic and ideogramic components to analyze the errors produced during five dictations proposed at the end of the circle of literacy (neurolinguistic approach). Results and analyses show that 63% of the words were error-free. Most errors were phonetics (59%), meaning learners failed to transcribe the right sound due to wrong perception and/or wrong transcription of certain sounds at the heart of the French phonological system (archiphoneme [OE] and nasal vowels). Learners also struggled with specific components of the French orthographic system such as apostrophes or use of capitals (ideogramms). The residual errors are morphogrammic, logogrammic, phonogrammic errors representing each less than 10% of the errors detected.