A didactic model of students’ grammatical reasoning: the case of complementation in French-speaking Switzerland

This research focuses on students’ grammatical reasoning. It aims to describe and model grammatical reasoning through three complementary studies that were led in French-speaking Switzerland. Centred on a syntactic function, the noun phrase complement (NC), and more broadly, on complementation as a linguistic metaconcept, the studies were conducted in order to make didactic propositions about teaching systemic language mechanisms. The first study analysed classroom verbal interactions, showing that students mobilise various syntactic strategies, whereas teachers sometimes rely on limited or predominantly semantic criteria. The second study was experimental, investigating students’ ability to transfer knowledge through analogy between noun phrase complements and verbal phrase complements. The results revealed a partial mastery of syntactic dependency and a limited transfer, suggesting a fragmented conceptualisation of complementation. The third study, based on metasyntactic interviews, highlights strong individual variability but few significant differences between primary (students aged 11–12 years old) and secondary students (14–15 years old) when solving syntactic ambiguities. Together, the findings lead to a triple modelling of grammatical reasoning according to the perspective from which it is considered: internal, external and didactic. The research underlines the importance of metaconcepts, the explicit teaching of grammatical relations and analogical reasoning in grammar education.