Bilingual (Basque-French) Grand Oral assessment : bases for a didactic engineering fostering sociolinguistic competences in immersive education

In the French educational context, where the linguistic rights of students in Basque immersion models are far from being guaranteed, we have explored the potentiality of didactic engineering of the teaching-learning of the Grand Oral (GO) exam in bilingual modality (Basque-French). To this end, we have  experimented with a teaching sequence at the Lycée Bernat Etxepare in Bayonne, the only high school in France where Basque is the medium of instruction. Moreover, the group of students we have worked with is currently the only one allowed to use Basque in this assessment. They get to do so because Basque language speciality allows them to alternate Basque and French in their argumentation and during the interview with the jury. In our article, we will analyze the evolution of their bilingual strategies, exploring the linguistic and sociolinguistic challenges involved in this communicative situation. Consequently, we will argue that assessments such as the GO can be adapted to the immersion context, always verifying the role of French based on didactic and sociolinguistic criteria. The results of this experiment could point the way to an assessment that would be more consistent with the educational reality described and respecting students' linguistic rights.