Moving from representations on multilingualism to professional practices in teacher training : the field of French Guiana to nurture didactics

French Guiana is a French department deeply rooted in multilingualism because of its history and the migratory flows it knows (Léglise, 2008). France has a long tradition of monolingual ideology (Goï, 2014). Tensions between these two situations can therefore appear at a societal level but also within education, especially in socially disadvantaged school districts in the department of French Guiana, where most pupils are multilingual (Alby, 2008). This communication will report on an empirical approach carried out on the field, during teacher training sessions for primary and secondary school teachers. This training aimed to draw up an inventory of representations on multilingualism, to develop these representations and to create levers to improve teaching practices (Simon, 2014). Initial data were collected from a survey on teachers' representations of their pupils' languages, supplemented by comprehensive interviews to gather their statements about their professional practices. Then, ecological data were collected in the framework of a collaboration between the academic trainers of the education authorities of French Guiana and a team of trainers and researchers: filmed observations of classes followed by interviews of self-confrontation with two teachers. The observables were transcribed and analyzed in order to bring out practices and professional gestures to confront them to the representations. In this communication, we will present some significant results and some future implications for teacher training in linguistic diversity. In particular, we will highlight the role of video resources, the co-construction of field situation analyses, and the collaborative project between teachers, trainers and researchers in training engineering. We will try to point out what the impacts of this research-action-training were, especially in terms of the recognition of multilingualism and teachers’ work in these complex multilingual contexts, and show to what extent transfers are possible to nurture the teacher training in language didactics and plurilingualism (Blanc, 2018).