Basque-French “Grand Oral” assessment in Basque immersion education : analysis of high school students’ bilingual strategies

This contribution aims to explore the bilingual strategies of students producing the bilingual Basque-French “Grand Oral” (GO) text genre in the only Basque immersion high school in Northern Basque Country (NBC henceforth) (France). 20 immersion students’ Basque-French GO productions are analysed. Previous research with similar text genres in the Basque Autonomous Community (Spain) shows that even if immersion students successfully manage linguistic alternation, they scarcely adapt Basque terminology when using English. The GO is an explanatory-argumentative text genre, addressed to a jury involving a monolingual French speaker. The analysis shows that students alternate languages with no lexico-grammatical difficulties. However, when they refer to Basque terms in French, they hardly include any clarification for the non-Basque-speaking member of the jury. These findings could shed light on a better understanding of Basque immersion students’ oral bilingual strategies and could contribute to the development of plurilingual teaching approaches in NBC multilingual education, which remain unexplored.