Langues minoritaires locales et éducation à la diversité: des dispositifs didactiques à l’épreuve par Philippe Blanchet, Martine Kervran (review)

Although his arguments and message are not new to experts, the volume would be especially useful to nonlinguists, whether colleagues, family members, or friends, to stimulate conversations on the future of the French language. It could also serve as an ancillary text for an upper-division undergraduate course on French linguistics. Pepperdine University (CA) Kelle Keating Marshall Blanchet, Philippe, et Martine Kervran, éd. Langues minoritaires locales et éducation à la diversité: des dispositifs didactiques à l’épreuve. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016. ISBN 978-2-343-08249-3. Pp. 156. Product of the fifth annual conference of the Éducation et diversité linguistique et culturelle (EdiLiC) association , this collected volume contains contributions that address educational endeavors in a wide variety of minority language contexts. Though each setting is unique, true in most is that education in the minority language has replaced intergenerational transmission. Language maintenance or revitalization are not the only focus, however, and a number of the eight chapters emphasize“awakening to languages”and students’and teachers’awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity. Among the contributions focused on language revitalization, Chauffin offers a detailed history of the establishment and development of Diwan schools to teach Breton, discussing attitudes and language usage of young people and finishing with the point that creativity in the language is an important part of its survival. Manterola and Almgren examine Basque language development among immersion students who live in a non-Bascophone area, finding that students do in fact develop the skills to be considered functional bilingual speakers. Jullian and Vernetto detail an ambitious project of creation and use of “sacs d’histoires” by and for children in Italy’s Francophone Aosta Valley and the Académie de Montpellier in France in an effort to valorize local languages: Familiar local stories, selected by students, were rendered in French as well as Occitan and Catalan (for Montpellier) and Franco-Provençal and Walser dialect (for the Aosta Valley) in books created for the project and accompanied by specific activities that students completed at home with family members. Specific instructional strategies used in minority education classrooms are addressed in chapters detailing the use of comparisons between Occitan and French in three classes in Calendretas (Occitan-language schools) in the south of France (Chorin), tactics for teaching math in Breton, which has a complicated system for rendering large numbers (Kervran et al.), and a project in which Spanish-dominant preschoolers in Galician immersion learned the numbers 1–10 in Chinese to increase their awareness of linguistic diversity more extensively (Zas Varela and Mas Alvarez). Plurilingual and pluricultural awareness of teachers is the focus of the final chapters. Ferreira da Silva discusses research with teachers in the North Region of Brazil, advocating that they take an intercultural approach to language instruction, with more 256 FRENCH REVIEW 91.3 Reviews 257 openness to linguistic and cultural diversity, and reorient cultural content to include not only France but also neighboring French Guyana. In the postcolonial setting of Reunion Island, where the French educational system is in place, but a majority of students speak Creole as their first language and have cultural references quite different from those of students in Europe, Lucas and Dubois consider the challenges faced by teachers and, with an eye to plurilingualism, promote consideration of the local language and culture in educational contexts.Although disparate in the specific topics that they address, and thus somewhat difficult to consider in a collective sense, the contributions included in this volume offer interesting insights into the complexity of language education with a plurilingual and pluricultural focus in each minority language setting. University of Louisiana, Lafayette Tamara Lindner Cerquiglini, Bernard. L’orthographe rectifiée: le guide pour tout comprendre. Paris: Librio, 2016. ISBN 978-2-290-13348-4. Pp. 95. Dupriez, Dominique. La nouvelle orthographe expliquée à tous! Paris: Albin Michel, 2016. ISBN 978-2-226-32239-5. Pp. 127. The often-animated discussions that took place in early 2016 concerning the orthographe rectifiée marked the continuation of a longstanding tradition, that of vigorous debate concerning the nature of the French language. These two books aim to clarify matters surrounding these debates and to address mischaracterizations of the reforms themselves. Cerquiglini’s short volume...