ÉPRISE

As well as protecting linguistic and cultural diversity, which is clearly a priority for Europe today, multilingualism meets the need to acculturate speakers of a language. According to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, "Plurilingual and pluricultural competence promotes the development of linguistic and communication awareness". This linguistic awareness, fostered by the metalinguistic activity associated with contact with several languages, is often lacking in young writers when they first learn to write. It is one of the factors that helps to promote distancing and reflexivity, which are essential dimensions of written production, the active side of literacy, which all international surveys show to be extremely heterogeneous from one European country to another. In addition to the sociological, pedagogical and teaching parameters that influence this heterogeneity, the way in which teachers take multilingualism into account and the image of the language transmitted to pupils can be questioned as factors in the acquisition of writing. This goes hand in hand with preserving the richness and diversity of Europe's linguistic capital at school. The ÉPRISE project (Multilingualism and Writing : Reflexivity as a Key for Inclusive Education in Europe) focuses on the link between the metalinguistic activities generated by multilingualism and those required for writing. In both situations, attention is paid to language: spelling, morphology, syntax. How is this worked on in the classroom? How does the design of the writing sessions encourage it? Is there a connection between metalinguistic work and multilingual contexts? What ways of managing multilingualism could have an impact on writing skills and, consequently, on the socialisation of young writers? To answer these questions, the ÉPRISE interdisciplinary project will bring together linguists, computer scientists, educationalists, psychologists and legal experts from five European countries: France, Italy, Estonia, Spain and Belgium. The educational authorities in the various countries (Rectorats and Inspections Académiques in France, equivalent structures elsewhere) will be involved and associated with the work. By focusing the study on the management of plurilingualism, the aim is to uncover the variables that explain the success of school and collège pupils in producing written work, in order to provide teachers and political and administrative authorities with working tools that are in close touch with the reality of performance. By building up a multimodal corpus of students' writings, collections of teaching practices, surveys of speakers' sense of language and data on countries' linguistic and cultural contexts, we will consider parameters such as: the extent to which schools take account of the multilingual context, the language consistency, linguistic ideology, the place given to linguistic reflexivity in the school context, all of which are likely to shed light on the diversity of teaching choices and students' performances. The results will enable recommendations to be made at all levels of decision-making, in particular regional and national language policies. Through ongoing work in the field, both in the classroom and in teacher training, and by involving pupils and teachers in the tools created, the project will contribute both to the protection of linguistic diversity in Europe and to the dissemination of teaching practices conducive to pupils' literary development, producing original recommendations backed up by the results of analyses and experiments in the various participating sites.