Repères, n°55/2017

What brings about the effectiveness of the teaching of reading and writing at the beginning of compulsory primary schooling? And which practices favour weaker pupils?

This edition of the academic review, "Repères", puts together or collates ten research papers. These papers are resultant from a research conducted by IFÉ, DGESCO, the Ministry of Education and several other research laboratories on the theme: "The influence of teaching practices of reading and writing on the quality of learning in the primary school".

As part of this study, 131 French primary school classes were observed during a particular school year out of which 2507 pupils were evaluated on three different occasions. The data were analyzed using statistical and qualitative methods.

The contributions gathered here in this review deal with topics such as: writing tasks, reading comprehension, the pupils' acculturation to the world of writing, the effects of encoding practices, and the study of language.

These articles seek in particular to shed light on what is characteristic of teaching practices when pupils from deprived/disadvantaged social backgrounds begin to progress.

Each article is also in itself coherent, but the cross-reading / comparative reading to which this review encourages makes it possible to avoid drawing too quickly conclusions to be enforced as prescriptive measures. This is because if the results presented, explaining the students' performances, their progress and the differences observed from one class to another, can inspire recommendations, then they must embrace the complexity of the factors highlighted which include the several configurations that lead to the same learning.