Literacy performances in French of bilingual school children in Mayotte

International audienceOne possibility of assessing reading comprehension of school children consists on asking to read a text and requiring to retell or to write in their own words (Shohamy, 1984; Kobayashi, 2002; Prince, 2012). This paper aims to consider assessing bilingual children’s literacy proficiencies in French by comprehension restitution task, whereby children write down what they have read. The study deals with bilingual children in Mayotte, a former French colonial possession in the Indian Ocean, where 7 languages are spoken with French as the official and the only school language. While previous researches on Mayotte mainly focused on language use and repertoire of pupils (Laroussi, 2009; Laroussi & Liénard, 2011) or on teachers’ attitudes towards language use in classrooms (Akinci et al., 2013), children’s literacy performances are rarely investigated.Due to insufficient proficiency in French, school failure is a real problem in Mayotte. Compared to results of the French mainland, pupils in Mayotte show significant differences in a negative way on 5th grade National Achievement Assessments. Politicians and teachers agree that this failure is related to the deep inequalities that these children encounter. Upon starting school, children are submerged into an education system where French is the medium of instruction often without any prior knowledge of French. In Mayotte, local languages have no written form; and consequently, children are multilingual in spoken language but monolingual in the written language, that being French.Within this presentation, we intend to focus on the literacy performances in French of 228 multilingual school children attending 6th and 7th grades (mean age 12 years-old) examined, and discussed in interviews (on literacy practices in and out of school activities), with regard to a comprehension restitution task based on two types of texts: one narrative and another expository. The criteria adopted were overall text structure, intelligibility of restitutions and lexical uses.Firstly, results of the written comprehension restitution of a reading show that these multilingual children successfully complete the requested task even if it is at a lower level. However, the type of text has significant impact on the children’s performances: they better achieve for narratives than expository texts. Secondly, as there is no interference from other local languages, their writing is very monolingual in French. Furthermore, they have specific understanding difficulties due particularly to an important lack of lexicon in French. Finally, implications for teaching are also discussed especially in order to perform literacy abilities of school children in the context of multilingual Mayotte