The impact of the language system: a study of teachers’ correction postures and rewriting modes in primary schools in France and Italy

Even if the writing of a text doesn’t specifically imply the reinvestment of orthographic knowledge, in a school context it relates strictly to the compliance of official rules of the alphabetic writing system. The teachers’ corrections regarding language mistakes are more systematic and influence the student/writer who gets to know the teacher’s expectations, the main recipient of his or her texts. Two linguistic contexts, the Italian and the French one, have been compared within the framework of a comparative study on elementary school students’ writing compositions (third grade and fifth grade) starting from the question “What will you do when you grow up?”. The incidence of specific features of the two languages is the focus of this research. On the one hand, it has been studied on teachers' correction practices, and on the other hand, on students’ rewriting choices of the first text.