Contribution de la linguistique à l’enseignement du français by Beatrice Pothier (review)

data was examined by teams from two other countries. Each team receiving data was asked to reflect on the practices they observed and relate them to what occurs in their own context. This feedback was then sent back to the originating team of researchers. One chapter, “Des actes de langage dans les classes de FLE/FLS à Suceava, Roumanie: comparaison avec Marseille et Sao Paolo” illustrates les regards croisés by presenting what the Romanian team learned about their own pedagogical practices after reviewing and reflecting upon their data, as well as the explicit reflections that they received from their partner teams. In addition to the introductory chapters, the book features articles from five teams presenting a synthesis of their individual research findings and articles from five additional teams exploring in greater depth one particular aspect of their research. It concludes with an article by Carton highlighting the difficulties encountered in directly comparing the results from one country to another, even with the explicit protocol that each followed, and pointing the way to future research. Readers will not come away with many insights on how to teach French or integrate culture into the teaching of French; they will most certainly gain a better understanding, however, of how one’s own culture informs pedagogical practice. There are some fascinating insights sprinkled among the various articles, invoking what the researchers have learned about their teaching through close observation and analysis of their own teaching practices, those of others, and the reflections of colleagues from a different culture. This preliminary volume should interest both scholars of pedagogy, as well as reflective practitioners, and will hopefully encourage others to engage in classroom research, observation, and reflection of their own practices. University of Maryland, College Park Mary Ellen Scullen POTHIER, BÉATRICE. Contribution de la linguistique à l’enseignement du français. Québec: PU du Québec, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7605-3145-1. Pp. xi + 181. 19 a. The premise of Pothier’s book is a valuable one: many teachers may have misconceptions about the linguistic errors that their students make; therefore a better understanding of the structure of the French language will ultimately allow them to better understand their students’ difficulties. A specific goal is to offer guidance for helping French-speaking children make the difficult leap from oral to written language. Contribution de la linguistique thus aims to introduce French schoolteachers to some basic linguistic concepts and to help them anticipate , as well as interpret, the mistakes that their students will inevitably make. Throughout the volume, Pothier repeatedly underlines the vast difference between the spoken and written language, often discussing the historical evolution of French. She also stresses the importance of recognizing how literacy can bias our perceptions of language, giving the teacher an erroneous impression of a direct and logical relationship between the written code and the spoken word. Following the introductory chapter, the book begins on a promising note with a discussion of phonetics and phonology and the inevitable confusion that children will experience when trying to transfer their oral competence in French to the written word. For example, Pothier points out that a student who spells the word absent as “apsent” has made a logical spelling error related to the devoicing of the 1236 FRENCH REVIEW 86.6 bilabial stop (although any literate adult might believe that this word’s orthography perfectly reflects its pronunciation). The following chapter continues with the closely related topic of determining word boundaries in spoken language and teaching students to write correctly. This issue naturally raises questions of what constitutes a “word,” particularly in relation to compound nouns such as sac à dos, which students might attempt to spell as “sacados.” Pothier recommends helping students sort through their mental lexicons, trying to identify different phrases or expressions in which a word may appear (for example, sac-poubelle, sac de couchage). From these two initial chapters and their clear and concrete examples and implications , the book ventures into more abstract territory, discussing the arbitrary relationship between signifiant and signifié (to illustrate this point, Pothier presents the numerical systems of a handful of foreign languages); synonymy and polysemy; language functions (including communicative and cognitive, but also metalinguistic and...