Béatrice Pothier & Philippe Pothier
With the contribution of Valérie Lartot-Pierquin for the Lexique.org integration
Database Description
ÉOLE provides, for the 11,694 most frequent words in contemporary written French, the percentage of pupils who spell each word correctly at each of the five grades of French primary school (CP, CE1, CE2, CM1, CM2). Whereas other databases describe exposure frequency to written words (Manulex, Novlex), ÉOLE documents spelling production by describing, for each grade, the actual state of lexical acquisition. The success rates were established from words dictated in context at the end of the school year to 48,902 pupils from 464 schools across France. Each word was written by at least 40 pupils at each of the five grade levels, resulting in the analysis of 2,368,885 spellings. The database also specifies the grammatical category of each entry and identifies the 136 words affected by the 1990 French spelling reform, tested both in France and Canada. A word is conventionally considered to have been acquired at a given grade when 75% of the tested pupils spell it correctly. This threshold is intended as a descriptive, not a prescriptive, benchmark; users should consult the interpretation guidelines before using the database. In particular, a pupil should not be judged for failing to spell correctly a word considered “75% acquired” at their grade level, as this would fundamentally misrepresent the purpose of the database. By construction, up to one quarter of pupils at that grade do not spell such words correctly, without this being pathological or even cause for concern.
Interpretation Guidelines
Detailed presentation document for ÉOLE.
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License
ÉOLE data (including query results) are made available with the explicit written permission of the copyright holders, in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Any use outside the scope of this license requires prior authorization from the authors.
Citation
Pothier, B. & Pothier, Ph. (2020). ÉOLE. Échelle d’acquisition en Orthographe LExicale, cycles 1, 2 et 3 (new edition). Paris: Retz.