An imaginary trip to the land of languages or how fictional writing allows primary school students and allophone middle school students to question their language representations ; Un voyage imaginaire au pays des langues ou comment une écriture fictionnelle permet à des élèves d’école primaire et à des collégiens allophones de questionner leurs représentations des langues

International audience ; The data analyzed in this contribution is one component of ongoing doctoral research, in a French context. We have set up multilingual activities about the study of the language and written production. The aim is to analyze their effects on grammatical learning and on language representations (Moore, 2001) among late elementary, but also among allophone secondary school pupils (Lamy de La Chapelle & Garcia-Debanc, in press).Many research have shown the value of language biographies (Simon & Maire-Sandoz, 2008; Castellotti & Moore, 2011) in enabling different audiences to become aware of the many languages with which they have been in contact in various circumstances: family languages, friendships, travel, cultural and sports activities, etc. To the practices of constructing language flowers, polyglot trees, or reflective drawings (Krumm, 2008), involving a direct reference to personal history, some researchers have proposed to add a third-person fictional writing, with the idea that "the indirect modality and the possibility of fictionalization should serve to amplify and enrich the initial text" (Berlou & Dompmartin, 2021).Thus, a third-person fictional writing instruction is proposed to late elementary pupils in multilingual and multiethnic environments (named in France REP) and in more culturally homogeneous environments (non-REP), as well as to newly arrived allophone teenagers in a reception system (named in France UPE2A). The instruction is: "Write a short text about the various languages in your life and your history. Your text will begin with the following sentence: He or she arrives in the land of languages. She/He is . Invent a name and use several adjectives that describe the emotions of your character. Describe this land of languages and tell what happens to your character. The pupils can use a word box made up of adjectives: amazed, astonished, lost, subjugated, worried, afraid, surprised, etc. This writing is offered twice to the same students: - in regular ...