Our research concerns modes of educating allophone pupils in middle school. We try to understand the reasons behind the academic failure of many of these pupils within the French school system. This failure is revealed in two ways at the middle school level: the majority of allophone pupils do not obtain the French General Certificate of Secondary Education and they are almost systematically oriented towards vocational fields (European Commission, 2008). These reports were confirmed during our previous research (Guedat-Bittighoffer and Dat 2009, 2012).

Our article analyzes the discourse of some of these pupils collected in 4 welcoming classes during semi-directive interviews. We shall show in particular that the allophone pupils interiorized "the normative consciousness" (Dabène 1994) of the institution as regards their language skills and that they are very often subject to negative perceptions of their multilingualism.

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