Apports et limites de la biographie langagière pour la recherche en appropriation des langues

Language biographies have been used for decades in order to document the construction of linguistic repertoires. However, the focus on the content of this narrative, instead of underlining the reflexivity inherent to such an approach, has veiled the role of subjectivity in this elaboration. This article aims to show how reflexivity can be analysed in order to better understand the sense one gives to his or her social experiences, and the benefit that the learner and/or the researcher can draw from such an approach. The lack of ethnographic data, the focus on a specific period of time and the sometimes great difficulty to induce narratives of the self will finally be evoked as limits for the biographical approach, both for the learner and for the researcher.