Didactique de l'écrit : simplifier la langue ou la présenter dans sa complexité?

This study compares first-graders acquisition of literacy in two different instructional settings. One teacher used a traditional approach based on a systematic presentation of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences while the other one was identified as a whole language teacher using literature and writing experiences, with incidental attention to phonics. During the school-year, documentation collection about the pedagogy included questionnaires, field notes of monthly observations of reading and writing lessons, systematic collections of the activities and analysis of the linguistic structures contained in the texts used in both classrooms. Data collection was conducted longitudinally and involved three tasks: invented spelling, oral reading and reading content recall. Differences between the two groups were in the difficulties encountered in the three tasks and in children's representations of the written language. The influence of the way the teacher presents the written language on first-graders difficulties and representations is discussed.