Encourage Pupils to Develop Conscious and Explicit Knowledge Through Grammatically Oriented Written Work. The Example of the Noun Phrase Complement

Abstract

This paper analyses the filmed and transcribed practices of primary teachers experimenting with a grammar teaching sequence combining text-based activities with grammatical conceptualisation activities. The aim is to show how such text-based activities give meaning to grammatical learning, in this case the function of noun phrase complement, and contribute to its conceptualisation. In such activities, teachers point to the knowledge, first using designations taken from everyday language or from the world of the classroom, and then formalise the knowledge by using specific meta terms. We are betting that this to-and-fro between the pupils‘ implicit use of the language, in production or comprehension, their intuitive understanding of grammatical phenomena and the teachers’ mediation using specific meta terms will ultimately enable them to reorganise their internal language with regard to the grammatical objects taught.