L’accès au vocabulaire en L1 et L2 des enfants bilingues franco-turcs en France âgés de 6 à 10 ans

Vocabulary access in L1 and L2 of French-Turkish bilingual children in France aged 6 to 10 years. Many researches on bilingualism of children from immigrant families show low is their vocabulary in L1 and L2 compared to their monolingual peers (Zablit & Trudeau, 2008; Treffers-Daller et al., 2007). This paper precisely focuses on vocabulary access in Turkish (L1) and French (L2) in oral production and comprehension of French-Turkish bilingual children at first, third and fifth grades at a primary school in France, in comparison with their monolingual French and Turkish peers. To do this, the German test Wortschatz- und Wortfindungstest für 6- bis 10-Jährige (Glück, 2011) was used. The results of bilinguals show a better level in L1 in the first grade and then a notable amelioration in L2 in the third grade and that the lexical gaps between the two languages is significantly reduced in the fifth grade. In the linguistic repertoire of bilinguals’, phenomena as interference, interlanguage as well as transformation of L1 with borrowings from L2 was observed. Although bilinguals’ total vocabulary is lower in the first grade, this delay is caught up in the third grade. According to the Pearson et al., (1993) correlation coefficient, there is a strong and positive correlation between two languages: the more we promote L1 development, the more we promote L2.