Our purpose is to investigate some hypothesis about the linguistic difficulties experienced by children from immigrant communities, and their didactic implications. These difficulties have been shown by many studies, including the recent investigation of the OECD about reading comprehension. Given the language change from family to school is usually taken up for explaining these difficulties, we start by examining the native sociolinguistic situation. The latter seems to be characterised by a destabilisation of the languages that come into contact with one another, and by an incomplete development of what we call a reference language. We define the reference language as the language in which the metalinguistic abilities can be developed. The not normed, hybrid and fluctuating languages spoken by the parents could have an influence with the children's communicative competence and therefore with the acquisition of their reference language. Given the relationships between the metalinguistic abilities and the literacy acqubition, this one could be affected. Further, the solution of the linguistic difficulties experienced by children from immigrant communities ought to be found not into a maintain of an original (and mythicized) language, but into an early acquisition of a reference language, whichever it is, at school.

Immigrant children Reference language Literacy acquisition Mother tongue

[No Keywords available]