Conversational Strategies and Contexts for Talk: Learning Activities for Franco‐Ontarian Minority Schools

Abstract

This article presents some problems of Franco‐Ontarian minority education, related to the heterogeneity of the student body and to students' reduced access to contexts for the use of French. It describes innovative learning activities, based on the ethnography of communication and cooperative learning techniques, designed to provide more flexible and broader contexts for the use of French. Finally, it presents an analysis of one episode of a small group engaged in one activity. The analysis suggests that students are able to build on the different communicative resources they bring to the task to jointly or variably address multiple embedded discourse and task and social functions, thereby extending their use and awareness of language.