Homophonie et maîtrise du français écrit : apport de l’apprentissage sur corpus

Mastery of spelling in L1 French is notoriously complex, in particular due to morphographic difficulties and grammatical homophony. This study investigates the use of data-driven learning in French primary schools for the homophonous set /sE/ (c’est, s’est, ces, ses, sais/t). The results show that whereas initially there is no difference in comparison to traditional teaching (i.e. following pre-test, fewer errors are made in general at the time of learning by both experimental and control groups), there is less attrition for the data-driven learning group, with some spellings progressing even at the post-test stage. We suggest that data-driven learning may be used for developing spelling in L1 French as learners are exposed to enriched input. The question of how a predominantly L2-based method can be applied to L1 pedagogy is raised