Fluence et prononciation de phonèmes en L1 et L2

Learning how to read is an important step in a child’s education. Our longitudinal study focuses on four native English-speaking children going to a French immersion school in the United States, as well as their families. These children learn to read in French, which is a foreign language to them. We aimed at finding out whether their home environment could explain good results in reading in the two languages: English, their mother tongue, and French, the foreign language, as Cummins (1981) suggests. To this end, we measured their performance in reading through their pronunciation and their reading fluency, and we had their family complete a questionnaire about their reading habits at home. The results show that the home environment does seem to play a role in the children’s performance but more generalizations must await further research.