This is a case study that focuses on the oral proficiency in English manifested by the 4-year-old sonof the author. He speaks Swedish as his L1 like his both parents but has been exposed to Englishsince he was one year old from using a tablet. The child’s spoken production was recorded andtranscribed with a focus on the plural-forms and the genitive. An important field that this case studyis motivated by is how child language development may be connected to the concept of innatism,that language is based on innate principles (Lightbown & Spada, 2013:20) as it has been found that anumber of languages are acquired according to predictable patterns and processes (Moskowitz,1994:621-627) such as a the u-shaped learning process and over-generalization which has beenfound when investigating both L1 and L2 acquisition (Abrahamsson, 2013:663). The aim of thisstudy is to find possible similarities within the learning process: whether L2 acquisition follows thesame developmental patterns as in L1 acquisition by analyzing the recordings mainly targeting theplural and the genitive morphemes produced by a 4-year-old L2 speaker of English. Findings in thisresearch revealed that the child demonstrated a similar developmental pattern in the form of theu-shaped learning process (Abrahamsson, 2013:663).

Alors que l'efficacité et l'intérêt des dispositifs d'enseignement bilingue précoce ont été largement démontrés, peu d'études se sont penchées en détail sur les processus à l'oeuvre dans l'acquisition précoce d'une langue étrangère. Cette étude vise à analyser le développement de la compétence en L2 chez de jeunes enfants, dans un contexte où l'école est la seule source d'exposition à celle-ci. À partir d'un corpus recueilli dans des classes de maternelle et primaire de deux écoles franco-américaines en Californie, nous proposons d'examiner comment des enfants anglophones de 4 à 7 ans scolarisés dans un dispositif de type immersif construisent leur compétence en français. En nous appuyant sur un cadre interactionniste d'acquisition de la L2, nous montrerons comment ce contexte spécifique impacte le déroulement de l'acquisition, en termes d'opportunités d'interaction et d'input adressé aux enfants, et examinerons dans quelle mesure il fournit un socle aux premières acquisitions en français. Cette étude vise également à évaluer le rôle de l'âge dans le déroulement de l'acquisition. Nous suggérons que l'idée selon laquelle commencer l'apprentissage d'une L2 le plus jeune possible serait garant d'une meilleure maîtrise de la langue n'est pas nécessairement valable dans ce contexte particulier d'acquisition, tant de multiples autres facteurs sont à prendre en compte (conscience linguistique et métalinguistique, stratégies d'interaction, influence de la L1). Des pistes pédagogiques sont également proposées à partir de ces résultats, afin de fournir quelques orientations pour l'enseignement bilingue en maternelle. / While the benefits of early bilingual education programs are widely praised and acknowledged, relatively little is known about the processes involved in child second language acquisition. The aim of this research is to investigate L2 development in young children while school is their only source of exposure to the L2. Relying on corpora collected in two French-American kindergarten and primary schools in California, this work focuses on how French is acquired by English-speaking children from 5 to 7 through immersion education. Following interactionist theories of L2 acquisition, it is shown how this specific context bears on the course of acquisition in terms of interaction opportunities and input addressed to the children, and also how it provides them with scaffolding patterns that are instrumental in the first stages of L2 acquisition. This study also attempts to assess the role of age in L2 acquisition and suggests that "the younger the better" position, as advocated by some researchers, does not necessarily hold in this setting. Instead, it seems that child second language acquisition in this context is a rather complex phenomenon involving many factors such as linguistic and metalinguistic awareness, interaction strategies, or influence from L1. Based on these findings, pedagogical guidelines for bilingual teaching in kindergarten are provided.