The aim of this study is to examine the impact of using a reading practice software on the acquisition of French as a second language among allophone students. Allophones are students from immigrant backgrounds who have arrived in France less than a year ago and have little to no knowledge of the second language. These students are faced with learning in a language that differs from their mother tongue, which has a particularly opaque spelling system (Seymour et al., 2003), impacting reading activities and academic learning. The use of digital tools designed to train reading activity, particularly grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, has shown promising results with monolingual students (Auphan et al., 2020; De Cara & Plaza, 2010). Thus, the interest in using such tools to train reading skills for allophone students arises.

Method and Results: 80 allophone students, aged from 12 to 14 years old, from different first language background and with French as a schooling language were recruited for the experiment. The students were assessed using questionnaires evaluating their linguistic history, standardized tests assessing their cognitive (e.g., Raven’s Progressive Matrices) and language skills (phonological awareness, reading speed, reading comprehension, morphosyntactic skills). These tests were administered before and after using the Graphogame software (Richardson & Lyytinen, 2014; Ruiz et al., 2017), which trains decoding skills in reading. The participants were divided into two homogeneous groups: the experimental group, which will use the software, and the control group, which will follow traditional learning methods. After three weeks of training, a post-test was conducted to evaluate changes in performance. The results show that the use of the software had a positive impact on the development of skills in phonological awareness, lexical access, and morphosyntactic awareness. They also raise questions about the relevance of developing digital tools specifically adapted to allophone students.

Keywords: Technology, education, reading, bilingualism.