Nowadays, in France, as in Europe, migration flows are intensifying due to globalization and school welcomes more and more students with different languages and cultures. At a social level, families have high expectations over French schools, representing a hope of evolution and success for the families living, most of the time, in an underprivileged context. Consequently, teachers have to deal more and more with allophones or alloglots students operating in a difficult social environment. Accordingly, our research intents to understand the plurilingual and pluricultural students schooling and their background questioning the didactical, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic dimensions in order to answer the questions of linguistic and cultural diversity in school.  Our main objective is to conceptualize the relationship between teaching and learning cultures when the cultural and social referents of families are distant from those of the school. We propose to question didactic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic misunderstandings in order to advance teaching practices and help students progress. Our theoretical framework connects sciences of education and sciences of language. It relies on language researches on language awareness and multilingual education (Candelier, 2003) on multilingual and multicultural skills (Coste, Moore, Zarate, 2009), literacy Entry for Allophone Students (Chnane-Davin et Cuq, 2017) and the teaching the language of schooling to Allophone and Alloglot students (Gouaïch et Chnane-Davin, 2019). Our study reports on a project called “stories bag” (sac d’histoires) in kindergarten. This project commits the Academic Delegation for Training and Pedagogical innovation (DAFIP), a group of researchers of and a teaching team of SFERE Provence (Provence Federation of educational studies and research) a nursery school in priority education network (REP+). In addition, a women's association in the neighborhood also helps to bridge the gap between school and families. The team participating in this project is therefore a multi-skilled team. 

In the United States, Canada, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, several studies have been carried out through multilingual projects and the circulation of bags containing stories translated into the students' mother tongue. The results of this research show that the implementation of these projects was beneficial for students' literacy but could prove ineffective if the parents' school culture was too far removed from the host institution.  Therefore, the project should aim to develop students' literacy skills while taking into account the educational practices of the parents (Iddings, 2009). Based on the results of previous research, the originality of our research lies in the fact that it is not only about the development of additive bilingualism (Gosselin-Lavoie and Armand, 2015) among plurilingual students, but also about their interest in the mother tongue of the other students in the class. Our research subject is to accompany and to raise awareness to the question of the students’ plurilinguism and pluriculturality via the making of a story bag in school and brought into their families by themselves. The experiment consists in a “tote bag” containing a book in French translated in the family language, a recording of the story, games and surprises and a cartoon made with digital tools.  For the school-families relationship, it is about to contribute to the co-education in strengthening the link between school and the families and open the classroom to the languages and cultures of the families. It also enables French-speaking and multilingual parents to open up to other languages and cultures (Auerbach, 1985) and to identify their linguistic heritage, to develop harmonious bilingualism (De Houwer, 2017) and to decipher the expectations and implications of the school, and Fostering the intrinsic motivation of students and family members. 

Our methodological approach is based on an action-research (Catroux, 2002) using qualitative data. First, in order to collect teachers' representations of plurilingualism and language of instruction (Verdelhan, 2002), language practices and family literacy practices and to understand their teaching context in order to involve parents in the project, we sent them a questionnaire. Then, we filmed classroom sessions to analyze the practices of school teachers during the study of French language albums, and then will be compared them with films of sessions on plurilingualism in the same classes after the stories bag will have circulated in the families. These sessions, which serve as a support for the analysis of actual practices, are followed by self-confrontation and then cross-confrontation interviews. In the same time, the research team, the teaching staff and the women’s association welcomed the parents to talk about the project “sacs d’histoire” and made them translate the stories in their mother tongue. Films of the translations were made at the same time as the distribution of a questionnaire and interviews with the parents in order to find out about their language biography and the socio-affective implications of learning languages and French after the experiment. Transcripts of the session films will help analyze the data collected.

At this stage of the study, the analysis of the questionnaires reveals a linguistic diversity of the students and their families but also a fairly varied level of literacy. The questionnaire and the interviews conducted with teachers reveal a genuine desire to introduce the school culture into the home through the “stories bag”, which could be based on family language practices (Auerbach, 1985). It also reflects a certain cultural ignorance on the part of the families they welcome, who are aware of the socio-economic difficulties they encounter. On the family side, interviews and films of translation sessions show the involvement of families who play a very important role in the "literacy socialization" (Dagenais, 2012) of their children. Nevertheless, some teachers regret having always the same parents involved in the experiment. The initial experiment carried out by the team of teachers did not work due to a lack of parental investment. With regard to the results expected in the future, the action-research implemented is intended to foster closer ties with resistant families in order to promote co-education. In terms of learning, the circulation of the “stories bag” and the learning done in class should foster the development of language skills and mastery of the French language among the students. Analyses and results will be made in the context of the articulation between research, field and training.

Catroux, M. (2002). Introduction à la recherche-action : modalité d’une démarche théorique centrée sur la pratique. Cahiers de l’APLIUT, Vol. XXI N°3 : la recherche-action :un autre regard sur nos pratiques pédagogiques (2e partie). Candelier. M. (2003). Evlang - l'éveil aux langues à l'école primaire - Bilan d'une innovation européenne. De Boeck : Bruxelles. Coste, D., Moore, M., Zarate, M. (2009). Plurilingual and pluricultural competence. Language Policy Divsion. Strasbourg,France. Chnane-Davin, F., Cuq, J.-P. (2017) « Outils linguistiques et entrée en littéracie chez les élèves allophones », in Jean- Meyer, M. et Pellat, J.-Ch. Grammaires et littéracies, Revue LIDIL n° 56 | 2017, URL : http://lidil.revues.org/4610 Chnane-Davin, F. (2013), Difficulté scolaire en FL1 et difficulté linguistique en FL2. Des emprunts didactiques pour des dispositifs d’aide . In S. Galligani, S. Wachs et C. Weber École : difficultés en question et questions de difficultés en langues. Paris : Riveneuve, 203-226. Chnane-Davin, F. (2008), Scolarisation des nouveaux arrivants en France. Orientations officielles et dispositifs didactiques . In JL. Chiss (dir.), Immigration, école et didactique du français. Collection «Didactique des langues, Paris : Didier, 21-61. Dagenais, D. (2012), Littératies mutlimodales et perspectives critiques. Recherches en didactique des langues et des cultures, les cahiers de l’ACEDLE, 9-12. De Houwer, A. (2017). Minority language parenting in Europe and children's wellbeing. In N. Cabrera & B. Leyendecker, Handbook on Positive Development of Minority Children and Youth (pp. 231-246). Berlin : Springer. Gosselin-Lavoie, C., Armand, F. (2015). Favoriser l’entrée dans l’écrit chez les jeunes enfants allophones. Revue canadienne des jeunes chercheures et chercheurs en éducation, Vol. 6, 2, 94-101. Gouaïch, K. (2019). La pluriculture de l’élève allophone : un capital à développer. Les Cahiers Pédagogiques. Dossier l’école et les élèves migrants. Gouaïch, K. & Chnane-Davin, F. (2019, sous presse). Enseigner aux allophones et aux alloglottes : mêmes défis langagiers ? In Mendonça- Dias, C., Azaoui, B. et Chnane-Davin, F. "Allophonie”. Inclusion et langues des enfants migrants à l’école. Éditions Lambert Lucas. Collection Didactique des langues maternelles et étrangères, dirigée par Pierre Escudé. Iddings, A. C. (2009). Bridging Home and school literacy practices : Empowering Families of recent immigrant children. Theroy in practice, vol. 48, 4, 304-311. Verdelhan, M. (2002). Le français de scolarisation. Pour une didactique réaliste. Paris : Presse Universitaire de France. Zougs (2017) Les gestes professionnels d’adaptation linguistique à l’école primaire, thèse de doctorat soutenue à Aix-Marseille Université.