Notre thèse s’intéresse à l’apprentissage de la lecture dans un contexte et avec un public particulier : des enfants anglophones scolarisés en école d’immersion française aux Etats-Unis (Minnesota). Ces enfants apprennent à lire en français langue étrangère à l’école alors qu’il incombe aux familles de les exposer à l’écrit de leur langue maternelle anglaise.Afin d’étudier comment s’effectuent ces apprentissages (en L1 et en L2) nous avons mené une étude longitudinale auprès de quatre enfants de 7,1 ans (âge moyen). Notre cadre théorique s’inscrit à la croisée de la linguistique, la psycholinguistique, la psychologie cognitive et la pédagogie. Notre démarche suit celle proposée par les recherches orientées en didactique cognitive.D’une part, les enregistrements des performances dans une tâche de lecture à voix haute de courts textes narratifs anglais /vs/ français nous permettent d’évaluer la prononciation, la réalisation de mots connus/inconnus, la fluence. D’autre part, des questions simples posées après la lecture nous renseignent sur le degré de compréhension. Enfin, l’environnement familial est pris en compte par le biais d’un questionnaire administré aux parents durant toute l’étude. Nos hypothèses concernent les apprentissages dans chacune des deux langues, les influences d’une langue sur l’autre et le transfert de compétence dans le décodage des graphèmes en phonèmes. / Our thesis focuses on learning how to read by a particular group of children in a particular setting: Anglophone children enrolled in a French immersion school in the United States (Minnesota). These children learn how to read in French as a foreign language at school while their families are responsible for exposing their children to written material in their mother tongue: English.In order to study how learning how to read occurs (in L1 and in L2), we carried out a longitudinal study among four children who were 7,1 years old (mean age). Our theoretical framework lies at a crossroads of linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology and pedagogy. Our reasoning follows the kind of research that has been carried out in cognitive didactics On one hand, we recorded the children while they were reading aloud short narratives both in French and in English. These recordings enabled us to assess the children’s pronunciation, their performance in reading known and unknown words and their fluency. On the other hand, simple questions, asked after reading, give us information about how well the children understood what they had just read. Finally, the family background is taken into account through a questionnaire that was filled in by the parents throughout the study. Our hypotheses concern learning in each of the language, the influences of one language on the other and the transfer of skills regarding decoding graphemes into phonemes.

This thesis is a study of language use in English language classrooms in primary schools in Hungary. The focus of the study is on the use of the target language (English) and the mother tongue (Hungarian) by the teachers and the learners. The teachers are all Hungarian native speakers, with varying levels of competence and previous experience in communicative language teaching, and this presents a challenge to the adoption of a communicative approach to the teaching of English. The National Core Curriculum endorses the communicative approach, with the expectation that the target language will be used as much as possible. However, in practice, the mother tongue is widely used in these classrooms, both by the teachers and by the students. There is therefore a conflict between policy and practice: the policy is that the target language should be used wherever possible, whereas the practice is that the use of the target language is limited to predictable and routine contexts. It is this conflict which constitutes the central question which is addressed in this thesis: how do teachers resolve the conflict between what they are expected to do, and what they feel capable of doing. Data from classrooms and interviews were collected and analysed, using both quantitative and qualitative techniques. The focus of the analysis was on the amount and function of the use of the mother tongue by the teachers. Comparisons were drawn between teachers of Grade 4 pupils who started to learn English in Grade 1 and those who started in Grade 4. This analysis is complemented by evidence concerning the teachers‘ beliefs and understandings about the pressures and constraints which affect their teaching of English to young learners. The results suggest that the possibility of communicative language teaching in these classrooms is constrained by various factors, including the limitations in the children‘s cognitive capabilities and the proficiency level of the children, and the teachers‘ preference for using their previous methods which included grammar, translation and memorisation; also by curriculum requirements such as the use of the textbook, and the necessity to prepare the children for examinations. The implications of these findings for curriculum development in foreign language teaching in other comparable contexts are discussed.