La conceptualisation dans l’apprentissage du genre grammatical par des apprenants adultes de FLE

Taking into account emergentist perspectives on Second Language Acquisition, this article expands on Besse (1974) « exercices de conceptualisation ». It suggests that conceptualisation or consciousness raising activities should aim at establishing a relationship between implicit and explicit learning. Learners’ intuition (based on statistical learning acquired through language use) should be confronted to grammar description in order to build metalinguistic representations about language structures, and strategies to use these structures and to keep on learning. Exploring adult learners’ elicitation, this article suggests objectives for conceptualisation activities for the learning of grammatical gender in French, more specifically for noun gender assignment.