Une ontologie des savoirs lexicologiques pour l'élaboration d'un module de cours en didactique du lexique
To improve first language learning in Québec primary schools, several variables must be taken into account, one of them the teachers themselves. Their training gives them the necessary knowledge to guide pupils in the development of their linguistic competences. One of these, lexical competence, plays a central role in the mastery of language. Lexical competence is the ability to understand and use lexical units, in oral speech as well as in written speech. To help pupils develop their lexical competence, teachers must not only themselves possess an appropriate level of lexical competence, but must in addition have acquired a certain amount of metalexical knowledge, that is, knowledge about the structure of the lexicon. The ministerial guide to the teaching profession (MEQ, 2001b) provides no guidance regarding metalexical knowledge required of future teachers. Moreover, there are no courses specifically devoted to lexical didactics. It is nevertheless in these kinds of courses that future teachers learn to prepare and guide activities in vocabulary acquisition and to evaluate their pupils' lexical competence. The scarcity of these kinds of courses in Québec universities may be explained by the youth of the discipline, whose theoretical linguistics foundations are still under construction. This dissertation on the didactics of French as a first language addresses the question of reference linguistic content for lexical didactics, as well as the training of future teachers in that discipline. Our research led to two complementary outcomes. The first outcome was to construct an ontology of lexicological knowledge. The second was the use of the ontology to specify and structure the content of a course in lexical didactics, devoted to the acquisition of metalexical knowledge by future teachers. Both the ontology and the course have been evaluated and validated by domain experts. The evaluation of the ontology supported the method used for its elaboration, as well as the structure of the concepts in the ontology. The evaluation of the course indicated that the course's content and pedagogical methods were correct and that the learning and teaching material were well designed. These results prove that the course is a useful tool for improving a teacher's training in lexical didactics. Our research as a whole makes a meaningful contribution to the intended domains, by developing a way to use a knowledge base (the ontology of lexicological knowledge) for educational purposes (a course in lexical didactics).
lexical didactics lexicology teacher's training primary school lexical competence metalexical knowledge didactics of French as a first language ontology lexicological knowledge developmental research