Les connaissances implicites et explicites en grammaire : quelle importance pour l’enseignement? Quelles conséquences?

This paper presents a review of research in cognitive psychology on implicit and explicit knowledge and learning from the point of view of written French didactic, focusing on its silent morphology, in order to draw consequences for teaching. Standard grammar exercises are then examined for the type of knowledge they require: to what extent do they prepare the students to write and revise their texts ? We show that most exercises are not adequate to develop either explicit or implicit knowledge of grammar.. Finally, initial results of an experimentation of two types of activities developping explicit grammatical knowledge, no error dictation and sentence of the day, are presented. Results are positive: experiments in 21classes of primary and secondary education show a strong effect on the ability of students to achieve grammatical agreements in French.