Identifying verbs: Knowledge development by students in class
The aim of this article is to describe grammatical knowledge related to the notion of verbs developed by students aged 12-13 while learning grammatical agreement for verbs. Our data, collected by filming lessons in class, indicate that students use more procedural knowledge than declarative knowledge to identify the verb and that recourse to marginal knowledge is reduced after the institutionalization of knowledge. However, prior student knowledge is vivid : it often resists the institutionalization of new knowledge. We discuss the implications of the results for external didactic transposition by stressing the relevance of systematic teaching of procedural knowledge.