L’insécurité linguistique dans l’espace scolaire réunionnais en cours d’anglais

Abstract

Linguistic insecurity may occur in a diglossic environment like Reunion Island, where French, the dominant, official language, is also the language of schooling. The native language with low prestige is Creole. The collected and analyzed data includes: language learners’ profiles, class observations, oral and written tasks in English language, and teachers’ interviews. Great efforts have to be achieved in the Reunionese school community to legitimize and enhance the use of Creole, even though it is recognized as a regional language. This article focuses on the progress of linguistic insecurity from the Reunionese macro-system to English classes on Reunion Island. According to the learners’ profiles, this insecurity may vanish. We thus examine the drawbacks of fragile skills in the French language partly linked to French-Creole contact mixing languages, to an unsuitable pedagogy, and the limitations of a monolithic French education system when learning a foreign language, such as English, in a plurilingual environment.