In France, language study is, more than ever, a central concern in the teaching of french (first language), as the new french secondary school's programs (year 11 to 13 in 2019) illustrates it. However, there is another common idea: french is difficult to teach because it is often reported that pupils are not very enthusiastic about it, and teachers feel uncomfortable teaching it. Our first thought was that gamification of grammar school activities could be a solution. But didactic research is clear: the creation of a fun way of teaching french doesn't solve the problem. Above all, the problem is tied to a lack of didactical transposition. It seems that pupils are interested in their native language but that they are not able to understand the concepts they are studying in class. They don't not connect school grammar teaching to their own everyday life experience of French language. So, comes one question: how can a teacher facilitate the birth of a reflexive language posture among pupils? This quest of metalinguistic work leads us to “les Ateliers d'Antoine”, a way of teaching french invented by the french searcher Lionel Audion (2015) for the elementary education. Les Ateliers d'Antoine, litteraly « Antoine's workshop », were named after the french linguist Antoine Culioli. This way of teaching grammar tries to reveal to the pupils the linguistic operations that they are not aware of, by making them solving a linguistic problem. Then we decided to try to adapt Lionel Audion's method to secondary education. So we created grammar worksheets and we imagined a protocol based on activities in order to stimulate a metacognition work with pupils. In our adapted version of les Ateliers d'Antoine, class is divided in groups of 3 to 4 children, ideally, the teacher constitutes the groups because he or she knows pupils' skills and prerequisites in french language. Then pupils cooperate and debate on the activities in order to elaborate the grammar rule of the notion they are studying. After the pupils' work in autonomy, the whole class proceed to a pooling of informations, debates can emerge, but in the end, the teacher will provide all the knowledge to his pupils in order to structure their observations. Our research offer an analysis of pupils (secondary school, year 7) verbal's transcriptions: communications therebetween and with the teacher. We tried to identify evidences of a metalinguistic work while the pupils were doing the grammar worksheets or while they were being interviewed by the teacher (in their group or in front of the whole class). Our results are extremely encouraging because they are testifying of a real metalinguistic work of the pupils. Pupils seek logical explanation for grammatical's problems they are facing with. They try to connect what they observe with their own knowledge in french language. We also look at the teacher's work and how he can stimulate the reflexive posture on language of the pupils. Our work is not a requirement but tries to provide our contribution and advices that could be seized by anyone who is interested in french grammar teaching.