Developing knowledge of polysemy in primary school to support lexical acquisition: an experiment with 10-11-year-old students

Many lexicographers and experts in vocabulary teaching, including Picoche (1993a), Polguère (2002), Tremblay (2009) and Anctil (2011), agree that some metalexical knowledge is needed in fostering and developing lexical competence at school. Building on this belief, this paper presents an approach designed to 1) explicitly teach the lexicological notion of polysemy to 10-11-year-old children, along with the exploration of polysemic vocables, and 2) use polysemy in reading and writing activities.