Cette étude, réalisée en Polynésie française, examine l’impact spécifique d’un programme bilingue sur la conscience morphologique et les liens interlangues tahitien-français. Cent vingt-huit élèves polynésiens ont été suivis du CP au CM2. Parmi eux, 59 ont participé depuis le CP à deux programmes éducatifs proposant cinq heures hebdomadaires d’enseignement renforcé du tahitien à l’oral et à l’écrit et 69 autres n’y ont pas participé. Tous les élèves ont été soumis, chaque année, à des épreuves langagières orales et de lecture-identification de mots, en français et en tahitien. À partir du CE2, ont été introduites dans les deux langues des épreuves de conscience morphologique, de compréhension de l’écrit et d’orthographe. Les résultats montrent un effet positif du programme en tahitien et des liens inter-langues entre maîtrise de l’écrit et conscience morphologique. La maîtrise de l’écrit en français est expliquée par le niveau atteint en identification des mots écrits en tahitien.

Many international scientific studies underline the advantage of bilingual children in oral language. This is especially evident in their meta-linguistic skills, as well as their writing, reading and written expression. Bilingualism could facilitate meta-linguistic development by allowing the child to differentiate early formal and semantic aspects of the code, perceive the arbitrary relationship between “ signified ” and “ significant ” and develop greater cognitive flexibility. This study, conducted in French Polynesia, had examined the specific effect of bilingual program on the morphological awareness and the cross-lingual effects of Tahitian-French transfers via the written word. A group of 128 Polynesian students were followed longitudinally from the end of First Grade to the end of Fifth Grade. Of these 128 students, 59 were part of an experimental group involved beginning in the First Grade, in two successive educational programs with five hours per week of Polynesian language and culture, which included systematic learning of reading and writing in Tahitian. A selection of 69 other students, who had never participated in these programs, constituted the control group. All students were tested each year on their oral language skills in French and Tahitian. At the end of Third Grade, a morphological awareness assessment in French was introduced (Reder et al., 2013), as well as a task of word recognition (TIME3 of Ecalle, 2006), a reading-comprehension (Lobrot, 1980) and spelling tasks (ECS3, Khomsi, 1998). These standardized assessments have been adapted in Tahitian. The first results acknowledged a positive effect of the bilingual education curriculum on Tahitian oral skills and on cross-lingual links between written skills and morphological awareness. In addition, the Tahitian word recognition greatly helped to explain the French written skills, after controlling the level of French morphological awareness.