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Dokuz Eylül University, Department of ELT, İzmir, Turkey, April 2020.
Prepared as a contribution to the distance education course: ELT Curricula.
FROM AN INTERNATIONALIZED COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH
TO CONTEXTUALIZED PLURIMETHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES
Christian PUREN
www.christianpuren.com
christian.puren@univ-st-etienne.fr
1
On-line document: www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/2020c-en/
Good morning, everyone,
First of all, I would like to thank my colleague and friend Professor Ahmet
Acar for giving me the opportunity to present to you my ideas on the theme
of this conference. I regret, of course, that I have not been able to do so
because of the pandemic that we are all currently experiencing, in all
countries. I hope that you and your families are coping with this difficult time
as well as possible.
To accompany this conference, there are two pages of photocopies that I will
need to have before you from time to time: these are the ones that I
reproduce in the next two slides. The Internet link at the bottom of each slide
gives you access to the online version, where each document is accompanied
by notes and remarks (in French).
1
2
Current objectives of language and cultural education
in a plurilingual and pluricultural society
2
3
3
4
Abstract
The communicative approach, or task-based (communicative) learning, has
unduly occupied almost all the space for didactic reflection and methodological
development in the world for the past 40 years. Indeed, this approach is not
suitable for all purposes and objectives of school-based teaching and learning.
We will illustrate this point using the historical evolution of methodologies in
France as an example. The pre-communicative methodology of the 1920s to
1960s, based on the reading and collective oral commentary of authentic
documents, retains all its relevance for students who only want to keep a
distance contact with the foreign language-culture. Two post-communicative
orientations have become necessary to meet the challenges of living and
working together in "a multilingual and multicultural Europe" (Common
European Framework, 2000), namely plurilingual approaches and a social
action-oriented approach. All these methodological matrices must be protected
and nurtured in applied linguistics in the same way as the diversity of languages
in the world or biodiversity in nature. The only relevant question is how to
select and combine or articulate them in language curricula taking students,
purposes, objectives and contexts, in particular local educational cultures, into
account.
The title of my lecture, "From an internationalized communicative approach
to contextualised plurimethodological approaches", clearly announces its
theme, which I develop in the abstract I sent before the conference. I let you
read it on the slide above.
4
5
[...] in a person’s cultural competence, the various cultures
(national, regional, social) to which that person has gained access
do not simply co-exist side by side; they are compared, contrasted
and actively interact to produce an enriched, integrated
pluricultural competence, of which plurilingual competence is one
component, again interacting with other components.
(Common European Framework of reference for languages,
CEFRL, § 1.4, p. 5)
However, the full implications of adopting a plurilingual and pluri-
cultural approach have yet to be explored”.
CEFRL § 2.3.3, p. 19
The CEFR has the idea of an "enriched, integrated pluricultural competence",
presented in the paragraph above. Further on, the authors write that
"However, the full implications of adopting a plurilingual and pluricultural
approach have yet to be explored" (CEFR chap. 2.3.3, p. 19). Indeed, no
reference is made in this document to one of the major implications of this
idea of pluriculturalism, which is that teaching-learning cultures, of which
methodologies are a part, must also be considered in their plurality, because
they enrich each other, and all of them must contribute in an integrated way
to the quality of teaching and learning foreign languages: they must be
considered as "methodological matrices" (cf. The second photocopy), all of
which are available for managing, in combination and/or in articulation, the
complex issue of school curricula.
5
The "methodological biodiversity” is a necessity in order to be able to
manage the complexity of learners, teachers, purposes, objectives and
teaching-learning environments.
6
My thesis:
The are also different teaching-learning cultures (national, regional,
social, personal, in different languages…). They too need to be
compared, contrasted and actively interacted to produce an enriched,
integrated multicultural teaching-learning competence
This is the thesis I will defend in this conference.
It is not a provocative thesis. It is based on a rational analysis of the
constraints and requirements regarding the practical implementation of
teaching methods in my country, France, and in several others I know from
having worked there. It is up to you to see whether or not this applies to
your own teaching-learning environment.
6
(See also Bygate, Skehan and Swain 2001, who argue that the
way we define a task will depend to a certain extent on the
purposes to which the task is used.)
What is task-based Language teaching?
Definitions of:
- Long 1985
- Breen 1987
- Skehan 1998
- Ellis 2003
- (Nunan: "My own definition is…")
7
David NUNAN, Task-Based Language Teaching,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
David Nunan, one of the reference authors of Task-Based Language Teaching
(this is the title of one of his best-known books, from 2004), at one point
raises the question of the definition of this methodology: "What is task-based
Language teaching? In a chapter of about ten pages, he presents (in their
historical order of appearance) the definitions of Long, Breen, Skehan, Ellis,
and then moves on to his own definition. As you can see in the slide above,
he interposes this short precision in brackets after the Skehan definition:
(See also Bygate, Skehan and Swain 2001, who argue that the way we
define a task will depend to a certain extent on the purposes to which the
task is used).
This short remark in brackets, as well as the vague expression "to a certain
extent"), present the question of the objectives of the teaching-learning of a
foreign language as a kind of unimportant detail, whereas this question is
essential: historically, in fact, it is the changes in the "social reference
objective" (i.e. what we want learners to be able to do in the foreign
language-culture in society at the end of their learning) that provoke the
transition from one methodology or approach to another.
Nunan here, and elsewhere the other promoters of Task Based Learning
(whose tasks are communicative), are very discreet on the question of
objectives. And we can understand why: the objectives of language teaching
7
for adults may not be communicative (as in the case of a learner who only
wants to follow the media of a foreign country or read literature in a foreign
language), and moreover the aims of school teaching of foreign languages
cannot be solely communicative: there are also, for example, educational
aims, which will require the in-depth analysis of authentic documents,
especially literary texts.
7
My own definition is that a pedagogical task is a piece of classroom
work that involves learners in comprehending, manipulating,
producing or interacting in the target language while their attention
is focused on mobilizing their grammatical knowledge in order to
express meaning, and which the intention is to convey meaning
rather than to manipulate form. The task should also have a sense of
completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in
its own right : a beginning, a middle and an end. (p. 4)
(David NUNAN, Task-Based Language Teaching,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004)
8
Here is Nunan's definition of "task" at the end of this chapter of his book. As
with the other promoters of Task Based Learning, there is confusion between
what is logically called a definition and a description. The definition always
corresponds to a very abstract and therefore very general notion, precisely
because it has to make abstraction of the different descriptions, that is to
say, of the form that the notion takes in different contexts.
The definition of "task" here is - and this is only - "a piece of classroom
work". What follows is the description of a certain type of task... and it is
clear that it is a communicative task.
Also in traditional methodology (the one that dominated until the arrival of
direct methodology in the last years of the 19th century), the task is "a piece
of classroom work", but this task is conceived and described in terms of
combined activities of learning grammar and applying grammar in application
exercises: for this reason this methodology is often called "grammar-
translation methodology".
8
Dynamic model of the macro-task "reading comprehension"
9
« Traitement didactique du authentique en classe de langue-culture.
Modèle d’analyse par tâches »
www.christianpuren.com/bibliothèque-de-travail/041/
This is how we can describe another "piece of classroom work", that of the
active methodology, which was the official methodology in French school
education for half a century, from the 1920s (following the direct
methodology, of which it is a version adapted to the school objectives and
environment) to the 1960s (until the arrival of the audio-oral and audiovisual
methodologies). As can be seen, this "piece (of classroom work)" is very
large and complex: it is made up of an organized set of cognitive operations
that pupils have to carry out on authentic texts (not only literary texts) in the
context of what is called, in France, the "explanation" or "commentary" of
texts. In this methodology, language is first of all an instrument for
understanding texts, and only secondarily an instrument for communicating
what has been understood from the text. This is still currently the model of
the language examination in the French Baccalaureate, for which it is
therefore not possible to prepare pupils solely through the communicative
approach.
Simplified versions of this model are used in the tutorials for authentic
documents in so-called "communicative" textbooks from level B2 or even B1
upwards: in fact, these are no longer textbooks that really come under the
communicative approach from this level upwards. It is no longer a question
of having the pupils discuss simulated everyday situations, but rather of
having them comment on authentic documents so that they can mobilize
their linguistic and cultural knowledge and extract new linguistic and cultural
9
knowledge from it: these textbooks thus mechanically, without knowing it,
revert to the "reading matrix" of the active methodology (cf. corresponding
photocopy).
9
PIRLS, Progress in International Reading Literacy,
http://pirls2016.org.
PISA, Program for International Student Assessment – Programme
International de Suivi des Acquis des élèves, OECD,
www.oecd.org/pisa.
10
The dynamic model presented in the previous slide corresponds broadly to
the reading comprehension tests devised by the experts of the standardized
PIRLS and PISA assessments, who have rediscovered, no doubt
unconsciously, the components of the macro-task of academic commentary
on texts from the 1920s and 1960s.
PIRLS and PISA currently only concern mother tongues in reading
comprehension. But a "foreign language" version is announced for PISA in
2024. It will no doubt be quite similar to the version for mother tongues, and
it will make clear how ridiculously simplistic the CEFR's descriptors of written
competence are: in this document, only what the candidate is able to say in
a foreign language about what he has understood is assessed: it is a
communicative perspective. In PIRLS and PISA, the focus is on what the
candidate was able to do with the foreign language to understand: it is an
action perspective.
10
The primary objective of foreign language learning is to ensure communication
between speakers of different cultures. Beyond this purely utilitarian function,
which is indispensable, interlinguistic communication aims at a deeper
dimension: knowledge of the culture and history conveyed by the languages
studied.
11
1. Reading matrix: (1920-1960)
French National Education
Foreign language final year program
https://cache.media.education.gouv.fr/file/SP1-MEN-22-1-
2019/70/3/spe585_annexe2CORR_1063703.pdf
Cultural themes ("Axes")
1) Identities and exchanges
What role does globalization play in the dynamism of social, cultural and
economic life in each geographical area? Does it promote diversity or does it
threaten it? Does it lead to an affirmation of particularity? Does it modify local
or individual particularity in favor of "global citizenship"?
2) Private and public space [...]
3) Art and power [...]
4) Citizenship and virtual worlds [...]
Here is an excerpt from the latest French instructions for the final year of
French secondary education, the year of the baccalaureate. This program is
based on files of authentic documents, both literary and non-literary. See the
first paragraph ("The primary objective... by the languages studied"):
although communicative competence is emphasized, it is clear that it is not
actually considered the most important (cf. "Beyond this purely utilitarian
function (...) interlinguistic communication aims at a deeper dimension: ...").
It is also clear from the rest of this excerpt that the approach based on
"cultural problems" implies in-depth work on texts on the part of the pupils,
since, as in the communicative approach, texts are not simply a pretext for
immediate and more or less superficial exchanges in a foreign language: On
the contrary, they are documents to be studied in depth as testimonies of a
culture, and because they are opportunities to reflect on one's own culture
and on universal problems: in the communicative matrix, the logic of working
on documents is a "support logic"; it is a "document logic" in the active
matrix (cf. the second photocopy; for a presentation of the five
"documentary logics" currently available, cf. "The five documentary logics
currently available (model)", www.christianpuren.com/bibliothèque-de-
travail/066-en/)
11
For children from social groups that are farthest removed from the
school culture, language is about immediacy and action, which is
often mimicking action when spoken. This relationship to language is
far removed from the forms of distance that characterize the
scriptural relationship that is characteristic of the school culture,
where the world is described and acted upon through texts. (p. 192)
Jean-Paul DELAHAYE, Extreme poverty and academic achievement.
The choice of solidarity for the success of all.
Report of the General Inspectorate of French National Education, May 2015
(http://cache.media.education.gouv.fr/file/2015/52/7/Rapport_IGEN-mai2015-
grande_pauvrete_reussite_scolaire_421527.pdf )
12
This passage from a French Inspector General of National Education shows
how the reading matrix is seen as an instrument in the service of educational
goals.
12
13
2. Communicative-intercultural Matrix (1980-1990)
After the "reading matrix", the second methodological matrix currently
available is the "Communicative-intercultural Matrix", that of the
communicative approach. The slide above shows the cover of the French
version of the Council of Europe's first major document, A Threshold Level,
the original English version having been published the previous year (in
1975, therefore), under the title The Threshold Level. This document consists
mainly of lists of realizations of language concepts and functions considered
to be necessary for a speaker to master a minimum level of language
interaction proficiency. The necessary cultural interaction competence,
known as "intercultural", will be developed in the following years by tutors
who will often specialize in this field, to the point of sometimes giving more
importance to the intercultural approach than to the communicative
approach.
13
In order to give the work of this group the widest possible relevance it
was decided to choose the objective which was likely to appeal to the
largest single group of potential adult learners, those who would wish
to be able to communicate non-professionally with foreign language
speakers in everyday situations on topics of general interest. These
learners, it was felt, would not only wish to be able to survive,
linguistically speaking, as tourists in a foreign country, or in
contacts with foreign visitors to their own country, but they
would also require the ability to establish and maintain social relations
of however superficial a kind. (p. 2)
Ek, J. van, The Threshold Level (1975).
Strasbourg : Council of Europe.
14
Here is an excerpt from the author of The Threshold Level that shows the
intended purpose for the intended audience. The social reference situation of
the communicative approach, the one for which it was developed, is the
tourist trip. It is in relation to the communication needs in this macro
communication situation that the authors of these Threshold Levels
intuitively selected the language concepts and functions necessary to
maintain a minimum level of communication.
The Threshold Level and all its editions for all national languages and a good
part of the European regional languages has contributed strongly to the
dissemination of the communicative approach in Europe.
14
15
During a touristic trip, we spend our time… GENE
to meet for the first-time people inchoate
individual
punctual
perfective
with whom we are going to have an
interpersonal relationship,
with whom we are going to stay for a very
short time
and we will leave them definitively
This is the analysis that can be made of the "genes" (or essential
characteristics) of the communicative approach.
15
"Communicative approach and action perspective, two methodological organisms
genetically opposed... and complementary.“ (in French)
www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux-liste-et-liens/2014a/
16
GENETIC ANALYSIS OF THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH
GENES DEFINITION GENETIC MARKERS IN TEXTBOOKS
1. The
inchoative
The action is
considered at
its beginning;
2. The
perfective The action ends
completely.
3. The
punctual
The action
lasts for a
short time.
4. The
individual
The exchange
is between
one person
and another..
- Dialogues always start at the beginning.
- Students learn how to greet someone and then
say goodbye for the first time.
Dialogues always end at the end.
- In the dialogues, it is always the same people in
the same place speaking on the same topic of
conversation in the same limited time.
- The characters rent a hotel room much more
often than an apartment. They never buy an
apartment or a house.
The reference group for the activities is the
minimum group for interaction: the group of two;
the interaction is actually inter-individual.
These genes constitute the "DNA" of this approach, as illustrated by the
"genetic markers" found in communication manuals.
16
17
Common European Framework of Reference
for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment,
Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2001
The second major Council of Europe text, after The Threshold Level of 1975,
was the CEFR of 2001.
17
The preamble to R(98)6 reaffirms the political objectives of its
actions in the field of modern languages: ...
- To meet the needs of a multilingual and multicultural Europe
by appreciably developing the ability of Europeans to communicate
with each other across linguistic and cultural boundaries (...).
CEFR, p. 3
18
This passage, at the very beginning of this document, marks a fundamental
change in the social objective of reference: it is no longer a question, as in
The Threshold Level, of preparing learners to meet passing foreigners on
tourist trips; it is now a question of preparing them to live in a society which
is their own but also that of other citizens who are entirely or partially from
different cultures (cf. "to multilingual and multicultural Europe").
I then put "to communicate" in bold: it is immediately apparent that the
authors of the CEFR have become aware of the new social objective of
reference, but that they have not drawn the methodological implications
from it: to live and work with people of different language/culture, it is not
only necessary to communicate well, and communication is then a means at
the service of these objectives, and no longer, as in the communicative
approach, both the objective and the means to achieve it.
The first photocopied document you have been given for this conference
("Current objectives of language and cultural education in a plurilingual and
pluricultural society") shows what are the new challenges of modern
language teaching and learning in Europe in terms of language and cultural
competence.
18
19
Acting together
Social-action matrix
Two new priority objectives
Living together
Plurilingual-
pluricultural matrix
The authors of CEFR became aware of the first new objective, "Living
together" (cf. the passages concerning "plurilingual and pluricultural
competence"), but not of the second, "Acting together", and they did not
begin to reflect on the implications of these two new social reference
objectives in terms of the necessary methodological matrices. Not, as they
say in their text, because they do not want to take a methodological position,
but because they have remained, from a methodological point of view, with
the communicative approach, which seems to them sufficient to cover the
new linguistic and cultural needs: this is why they will consider - and some
still consider - the action perspective as a simple "extension" of the
communicative approach.
This quotation from the author of the CEFR User's Guide (see next slide) is a
good illustration of this.
19
20
TRIM J. (éd.), Common European Framework of Reference for Languages:
Learning, Teaching and Assessment – Guide for Users. Strasbourg:
Language Policy Division, 1997
"Task-based learning" is, quite naturally, a strong and growing
tendency in the communicative approach.
Nota Bene: 1st ed.1997 (the year following the first provisional edition of
the CEFR, which dates from 1996. Citation reference: A Guide for Users.
Sophie BAILLY, Sean DEVITT, Marie-José GREMMO, Frank HEYWORTH, Andy
HOPKINS, Barry JONES, Mike MAKOSCH, Philip RILEY, Gé STOKS and John
TRIM (Ed.) Language Policy Division Strasbourg, 2001, p. 19.
20
21
[Plurilingual competence is] a communicative competence to which all
knowledge and experience of language contributes and in which
languages interrelate and interact.
CEFRL, p. 4
3. Plurilingual-pluricultural matrix
In fact, preparing students to live together in a multilingual and multicultural
society requires a new methodological matrix, which can be called the
"plurilingual-pluricultural matrix" (cf. the second photocopy). However, it is
clear from the above quotation that the authors of the CEFR cannot detach
themselves from the communicative paradigm, in which communication is
both the means and the goal: plurilingual competence is reduced for them to
communicative competence in several languages at the same time. In a
multilingual society, it is of course necessary to be able to communicate in
several languages, but this communicative interaction competence in several
languages is only a means to the service of the social objective, which is
mediation (cf. the first photocopy). This is the fundamental reason, it seems
to me, why the authors of the 2001 CEFR did not feel the need to elaborate
scales of competence and descriptors for mediation.
I have shown, in a CEFR analysis, that the same applies to pluricultural
competence, which the authors of the CEFR consider as intercultural
competence in several cultures at the same time (cf. my article "Complex
model of cultural competence (historical trans-, meta-, inter-, pluri-, co-
cultural components): examples of current validation and application", chap.
3.1. Analysis of the concept of "cultural competence" in the CEFR, pp. 12-15,
www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/2011j/ (French text)
21
6.4 PRINCIPES
OF APPROACH
6.4.1 Rational Appeal: the use of translation
[...]
What we are aiming to do is to make the learner conceive of the
foreign language in the same way as he conceives of his own
language and to use it in the same way as communicative activity.
This being so, it would seem reasonable to draw upon the learner's
knowledge of how his own language is used to communicate. That is
to say, it would seem reasonable to make use of translation. (pp. 159)
[...]
Translation here, then, is an operation on language use and not
simply on language usage and aims at making the learner aware of
the communicative value of the language he is learning by overt
reference to the communicative functioning of his own language.
(p. 160)
22
WIDDOWSON H.-G. 1978. Teaching language as communication,
Oxford : Oxford University Press
The communicative approach has been developed on the basis of the direct
paradigm: learning to practice a foreign language through the practice itself
is seen as a means to be used exclusively. The quotation above is a passage
from one of the reference works on the communicative approach in France.
However, this passage has been completely ignored (or censored!) by French
communicative methodologists because it went against the direct paradigm.
22
23
- Primary education: Programs to raise awareness of different
languages
- Secondary education: Integrated Didactics
- Adult education: Programmes for cross-comprehension between
“neighboring” languages
Pluricultural approaches existing since the 1980s
Here are three plurilingual approaches that have existed in Europe since the
1980s. I will limit myself here to the so-called "integrated didactic" approach.
23
[...] the IPM [Integrated Plurilingual Methodology] implies that
observation activities and reflective distancing (on texts, oral or written,
on authentic or fabricated corpora) be implemented as a minimum, with
an inductive approach. These activities lead to more or less elaborate
explanatory phases depending on the age of the learners (…)
[...] In our conception of IPM, the activities can be fun, manipulation,
transformation, completion, creation or considered more traditional,
such as those used to operate the conceptualization. Thus, [the IPM]
will make room for metalinguistic learning and will not be
reduced to only communicative approach or action-oriented
learning. (pp. 250-251)
24
Bruno Maurer & Christian Puren, CECR : par ici la sortie ! [CEFR : this
way out!], EAC, Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, 2019, 6+314
p. https://eac.ac/books/9782813003522 (French text)
The idea of this "integrated didactics" has been taken up and developed in a
book written in collaboration with myself (CEFR: this way out!] in a chapter
entitled "Towards an integrated multilingual methodology (MPI)". It
proposes, as can be seen in the last lines of this quotation (in bold above), a
methodology different from the communicative approach and the action
perspective.
The translation into English of this book is currently underway (April 2020).
It will be available free of charge online, as is already the French version.
24
25
The approach adopted here, generally speaking, is an action-
oriented one in so far as it views users and learners of a language
primarily as “social agents’” i.e. members of society who have tasks
(not exclusively language-related) to accomplish in a given set of
circumstances, in a specific environment and within a particular field
of action. While acts of speech occur within language activities, these
activities form part of a wider social context, which alone is able to
give them their full meaning.
(CEFR p. 9)
25
4. Social-action matrix
The "Social-action matrix" is only defined, in the CEFR, in these few lines,
which are undoubtedly the best known and cited in this document. What is
less common, it seems to me, is to point out that the authors of this
passage, without saying so and probably without knowing it well, clearly
oppose the reference action of the communicative approach (the "acts of
speech") to the reference action of what is therefore, necessarily, another
methodology, namely the action of the "social agents", social action. Each
methodology is in fact defined fundamentally by the action for which it aims
to prepare pupils. For the communicative approach, it is language
interaction, for the action perspective, it is social action.
26
« Approche communicative et perspective actionnelle,
deux organismes méthodologiques génétiquement opposés... et complémentaires »
www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/2014a/
GENETIC ANALYSIS
OF THE SOCIAL-ACTION-BASED LEARNING
Genes
of the CA
the
inchoative
the
punctual
the
perfective
the
individual
Genes
of the SABL Most of the social work we do...
the
repetitive
the
durative
the
imperfective
the
collective
... are repeated more or less identically
throughout the day, week, month or even
year;
...have a certain duration, or at least are
part of the duration;
... do not end completely (they are
always subject to being resumed and/or
extended later) ;
... are carried out collectively, or in
relation to others, or at least taking into
account the actions of others.
However, the "genes" for these two types of action are radically different, as
the following table shows.
26
27
Les Cahiers de recherche du GIRSEF - N°110, septembre 2017-
« "Faire société" dans un monde incertain. Quel rôle pour l'école ? »
Les Cahiers de recherche du GIRSEF - N°111, septembre 2017-
Living together in an uncertain world. What role for the school ?
Many educational planners also find it difficult to differentiate between the
challenge of living together - that of multilingual methodologies - and that of
the action perspective. I have the impression that the difficulty is particularly
great for English-speaking courseacticians: indeed, it would seem that it is
difficult, in the English language itself, to differentiate between "living
together" and "doing together". The French journal Les Cahiers de recherche
du GIRSEF published in September 2017, as you can see on this slide, an
issue entitled "Faire société dans un monde incertain". Now, the editors of
this journal have translated "Faire société" as "Living together". "Making
society" means, as a citizen, making a contribution to social cohesion by
participating in the common project of all citizens, it is not only living
together by identifying mainly with the community to which one belongs.
27
28
[Living together] is an intellectual, political and societal stance that
advocates tolerance, anti-racism and anti-discrimination. But the
formula has become a catch-all. ...] The discourse of living together
increasingly serves our inability to act together. ...] Personally, the
notion of "in common" seems more relevant to me, [i.e.] the defence
of common values and "doing things together". That is, building
common actions and projects on issues of exclusion and equality.
GEISSER Vincent. 2018. “Le "faire ensemble" me semble plus
pertinent“ ["Doing together" seems more relevant to me”] , Le Courrier
de l'Atlas n° 212, January, p. 26.
The challenges of "living together as a society" are of a different nature from
those of "living together in society". Here is an excerpt from the interview of
a young French sociologist, Vincent Geisser, published in a magazine issue
whose dossier was devoted to "living together" (hence the title of his
interview: "Doing together seems more relevant to me"). His position is
shared by many French intellectuals, because it corresponds to the dominant
political philosophy in France, where what founds the "nation" is the project
of a society common to all citizens. This idea, which is very demanding in
terms of the ideological cohesion it implies for all citizens, explains the very
negative connotation of the term "communitarianism" in my country.
28
29
Knowing how to act on and through information as a social actor
« Les implications de la perspective de l'agir social sur la gestion des connaissances en
classe de langue-culture : de la compétence communicative à la compétence
informationnelle »
www.aplv-languesmodernes.org/spip.php?article1841
Informational competence
Information has a central status in the communicative approach, because
language interaction is essentially an exchange of information. The action
perspective, the perspective of social action, fundamentally changes the
conception of information: we move from communicative competence to
informational competence, which I define in the slide above in a way that is
adapted to the action perspective.
29
Forest Woody Horton, Jr
Understanding Information
Literacy: A Primer
Paris: UNESCO, 2008, 94 p.
30
This definition corresponds to what is otherwise known as "information
literacy". A description of Information Literacy is provided in this document
published by UNESCO in 2008.
30
Stage
1. Realize that a need or problem exists that requires info. for its satisfactory
resolution
2. Know how to accurately identify & define the info. needed to meet need or
solve problem
3. Know how to determine if the needed info exists or not, and if it does not, go
to Stage 5
4. Know how to find needed info. if known to exist, and then go to Stage 6
5. Know how to create, or cause to be created, unavailable info. (i.e. create new
knowledge)
6. Know how to fully understand found info., or know where to go for help if
needed to understand
7. Know how to organize, analyze, interpret, and evaluate info., including
source reliability
8. Know how to communicate and present info. to others in approp./ usable
formats/ mediums
9. Know how to utilize info. to solve problem, make decision, or meet need
10. Know how to preserve, store, reuse, record and archive info. for future use
11. Know how to dispose of info. no longer needed, and safeguard info. that
should be protected (pp. 59-60)
Annex B – The information literacy
life cycle explained
Information Literacy Life Cycle
31
This control is described in this way in an Appendix to this document. You
can see that communication is only one of the 11 operations listed here.
Training a social actor in information literacy is not only about training
him/her to communicate. In today's world, in which anyone can
communicate anything to anyone at any time via the Internet, the first skill
of a responsible citizen is, on the contrary, not to communicate immediately.
He or she must first check the reliability of the information, and only address
it to those who will need it. For a long time now, companies have been told:
"Only the right information to the right person at the right time! »
The responsibility of a social actor towards information also requires him to
take into account the requirements of its effective use/re-use by others than
him, elsewhere, at other times and for other actions: the stakes of training a
social actor in information literacy go far beyond, as we can see, those of
effective communication in the KT situation of reference language
interaction, which was that of a punctual exchange of information between
two individuals.
We can say "de-responsibility" in KT: learners are asked to communicate
information that they have not evaluated themselves (upstream), and
without worrying about the effect that it has produced / the use that will be
made of it (downstream).
Reference task of KT, the crossover between peer work and information gap.
Conclusion that can be drawn from it: (next slide)
31
http://www.education.gouv.fr/cid55748/le-diplome-de-competence-en-langue-dcl.html
PHASES DURATION COMPONENTS TASKS
IReception
Reading
Collecting information from written
documents, selecting and prioritizing
them
II Reception
Listening
comprehension
Collecting information from audio and
visual documents, selecting and
prioritizing them
III 10’ Reception
Production
Interaction Collecting information by phone
IV 20’ Production
Oral expression
Interaction
Presenting, arguing and negotiating in an
oral interaction situation
V 40’ Production
Written
expression Writing in a defined format
DIPLÔME DE COMPÉTENCE EN LANGUES
Scénario d’évaluation (2002)
32
One of the few qualifications that meet the requirements of the action
perspective is the "Diploma in Language Competence". It has been oriented
towards social action since it was developed at the beginning of the 1990s,
without its creators realizing it (I was part of it: I directed the design of the
Spanish version of this Diploma), because it was intended to certify a level of
competence in the use of a foreign language in the workplace. See the
"evaluation scenario" of this certification, which is carried out in the form of a
"global simulation" (you can search on the Internet with the expression
"global simulation"): the candidate receives a large file of written and visual
documents (phases I and II) with which he or she must prepare a written
synthesis or project for his or her company. But he does not have the time to
analyse each document in detail: he has to select very quickly what interests
him. In phase III, he goes to a room, where a telephone rings immediately:
at the end of the phone, an examiner, who plays a role in the overall
simulation, is able to give him additional information, but he will only give
the information that the candidate explicitly requests. Then, in phase IV, he
meets a person from the company (e.g. the boss: it is also an examiner who
plays this role) to present his text. The examiner reacts to his initial
proposals, suggests other avenues, or even makes counter-proposals.
Finally, in phase V, the candidate writes the final version of his text.
We see in this scenario operations that never appear - or so rarely that I
personally have never seen them - in the communicative approach:
32
- eliminate irrelevant information (i.e. not useful for the final action);
- identify the missing information (to ask for it in phase III) (A truly action-
oriented manual is thus a manual where in all the units there is an instruction
that does not make sense in the communicative approach: "Listen/read this
document carefully, and identify the information that is not in it. »
- prioritize and reformulate all the information according to the action
requested and the requester.
32
Methodological matrices currently available
in school didactic of languages and cultures in France
TARGETED SOCIAL COMPETENCES
Act for the intended
use
Privileged act
of learning
Language
competence Cultural competence
1. Reading matrix:
(1920-1960)
Ability to maintain
contact with the foreign
language from a distance
on the basis of authentic
documents
Ability to mobilize and
extract knowledge about the
foreign culture from and
about authentic documents:
metacultural component.
read,
speak on a document
(« parler sur un
document »)
Collective oral
explanations in
class of authentic
documents
2. Communicative-
intercultural matrix :
(1980-1990)
Ability to exchange
information with visiting
foreigners on an ad hoc
basis during initial
contacts or short stays
Ability to control cross-
representations in
interaction with others:
intercultural component
meet,
talk with others
(« parler avec d’autres »)
Interactions
in class
in simulations
and role-playing
3. Plurilingual-
pluricultural matrix :
(1990-…)
Ability to “live together”,
i.e. to manage
linguistically the
permanent cohabitation
with allophones in a
multilingual and
multicultural society
Ability to understand the
attitudes and behaviours of
others and to adopt common
attitudes and behaviours
acceptable in a culturally
diverse society:
pluricultural component
live with the others,
talk to each others
(« se parler »)
Cross-language
conceptualization
activities
4. Social-action matrix :
(2000-...)
Ability to “make society”
and to work in a foreign
language in a long-term
with native and non-
native speakers of that
language.
Ability to developing with
the others common
conceptions of society and
collective action on the basis
of shared contextual values:
co-cultural component
act with the others,
consult with the others
(« en parler avec les
autres,
se concerter »)
real or simulated
social actions
carried out in
project mode in
class society
and/or outside
33
« Matrices méthodologiques actuellement disponibles en didactique des langues-cultures »
www.christianpuren.com/bibliothèque-de-travail/073/
This is the second photocopy that was distributed to you. It presents the four
"methodological matrices" currently available in France, which correspond to
the major methodologies that have succeeded one another since the
beginning of the 20th century: the active methodology, the communicative
approach, the plurilingual and pluricultural methodologies, and the social
action-oriented approach. All these "methodological matrices" must remain
available, and they must be combined and/or articulated with each other,
because they are all indispensable if school curricula are to cover the totality
of the aims and objectives of school teaching of modern foreign languages.
33
Project presented at the XII SEDIFRALE (Rio de Janeiro, June 2001)
This project involved pupils from FLE in the city centre of a South
American capital to read their Spanish translations of French poetry in
classes in the "disinherited" suburbs of the capital.
To achieve this, they had to carry out six main types of activity:
The project, an integrator of methodological matrices
34
The most successful form of social action is provided by a pedagogy that has
long been known - at least since John Dewey (1859-1952) in the USA - the
'project pedagogy'. Because it is complex, any pedagogical project is likely to
require students to mobilize all the methodological matrices. Here is an
example of a project that I saw presented in Rio de Janeiro in 2001 by a
Guatemalan teacher of French as a foreign language.
34
DOMINANT METHODOLOGICAL MATRICES AM CA PM SAOA
1. To design themselves the main lines of this project: which
establishments to choose, which contacts to make, how to present
the project on this occasion, with which purposes and objectives;
X X
2. To collectively define the criteria for selecting the poems
according to the purposes and objectives chosen and select them,
to divide the work into groups;
X X
3. To study the selected poems in depth so as to be able to render,
in their translation into Spanish, the maximum number of
connotations, implicit and stylistic effects according to the target
audience;
X X
4. To translate the poems among themselves, justifying and
defending their choices when there was disagreement; to compare
their translations, to argue them, to take the necessary collective
decision
X X
5. To prepare collectively the expressive readings and the answers
to the reactions, remarks and possible questions of their audience;
X X
6. To carrying out their project in the classroom.
X X
www.christianpuren.com/bibliothèque-de-travail/053/
AM = Active methodology, and reading and metacultural competences
CA = Communicative approach, communicative and intercultural competences
PM = Plurilingual methodologies, plurilingual and pluricultural competences
SAOA = Social-action oriented approach, co-lingual and co-cultural competences
35
As you can see, this project asks students for combinations and articulations
of all the available methodological matrices, those inherited from all the
methodologies that have succeeded each other in France since the beginning
of the 20th century.
35
36
Current objectives of language and cultural education
in a plurilingual and pluricultural society
I come back to your first photocopy, which presents all these methodologies
(bottom line of the table): the training of a social actor at school requires the
pursuit of all the objectives listed in the top line (Learning about others,
Meeting others, etc.).
36
37
The Common base of knowledge,
competencies and culture…Corresponding matrix
- "...opens to knowledge, forms judgment and
critical thinking, based on ordered elements of
rational knowledge of the world;
Reading matrix
- …fosters the development of the individual in
interaction with the world around him;
Communicative-
intercultural matrix
- … provides a general education open and common
to all and based on values that enable people to live
in a tolerant, free society;
Plurilingual-pluricultural
matrix
- ... gives pupils the means to engage in school
activities, to take action, to interact with others, to
gain their autonomy and thus gradually exercise
their freedom and their status as responsible
citizens."
Social-action matrix
Ministère de l'éducation nationale, de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche,
Socle commun de connaissances, de compétences et de culture,
Bulletin officiel n°17 du 23 avril 2015
Here are a few extracts (left column) from the Common base of knowledge,
competencies and culture currently in force in the French National Education
system for all subjects taught there. It so happens that the different
purposes presented are worked on in a specific way, and therefore as
efficiently as possible, by each of the available methodological matrices. It
seems obvious to me that the communicative approach cannot claim, as
such, to be the most adequate to pursue each of these aims at the same
time.
To conclude briefly:
In this conference, I have taken the example of school didactics in France,
which currently has to resort, in order to cover all its aims and objectives, to
all the methodological matrices inherited from the methodologies that have
succeeded each other in that country since the beginning of the 20th
century.
The situation is probably not exactly the same in Turkey. But it would really
surprise me if the communicative approach could meet all the requirements
of school foreign language teaching there: probably now, in your country too,
you have to go "from an internationalized communicative approach to
contextualised plurimethodological approaches".
37
