Metalinguistic skills in teaching-learning bilingual process. Grammatical gender in French.

摘要

This paper, on the acquisition of French gender by six to nine year old Spanish children receiving education in French, has a theoretical part, framed in interlanguage studies based in errors analysis, and an experimental part, which shows the results of a longitudinal study with two groups of informants, through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of errors.;We start from the hypothesis that Spanish students of French doubt or are wrong when assigning grammatical gender to French nouns, and that appropriate strategies can make gender acquisition easier. We infer that metalinguistic skills development may facilitate that acquisition.;In each of the three written proofs, the informants had to place an article in front of French nouns or to place adjectives behind them. These nouns belong to three semantic fields (parts of the body, meals, clothes). Besides, we questioned the informants to get oral judgements showing the strategy that the informants used in their choice.;The results confirmed our hypothesis: The smallest number of errors in the results of the last proofs shows that the informants have progressed in the knowledge of the language, and the change of strategies used by the informants when assigning the gender shows their cognitive development.;The nouns having different gender in both languages cause more errors than the ones having the same gender, except for well known nouns. When phonetics prevails there is no metalinguistic activity. If the informants face unknown nouns they usually turn to the equivalent word in their native tongue causing interferences. This comparison and contrast of languages involves reflection and manipulation of linguistic structures and, therefore, metalinguistic activity.;In the first level the phonetic strategy is the main one used for justifying the choice of the article or adjective; this unconscious activity is not metalinguistic. However, in the second level many informants use the reference to grammatical gender. This conscious activity involves reflection on the language and manipulation of the gender formants, so it is a metalinguistic activity, although this activity sometimes causes errors showing that the required skill is not well-developed. In both levels investigated the reference to the noun suffix is also frequent.