Content uploaded by Christian Puren
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Christian Puren on Nov 11, 2022
Content may be subject to copyright.
1
PEDAGOGICAL PROJECT AND ENGINEERING OF THE DIDACTIC UNIT
by Christian Puren
Professor Emeritus of the Jean Monnet University of Saint-Etienne
http://www.christianpuren.com
Translation of :
« Projet pédagogique et ingénierie de l'unité didactique ». Conférence au XXXIIe Congrès de
l'APLIUT (Association des Professeurs de Langues des Instituts Universitaires de Technologie),
« Les enseignants de langues, ingénieurs de projets », IUT de Vannes – 3, 4 et 5 juin 2010.
Published in the online journal of APLIUT, Recherches et pratiques pédagogiques en langues de
spécialité, Vol. XXX, n° 1-2011 ("Les enseignants de langues, ingénieurs de projet"), pp. 11-24,
https://journals.openedition.org/apliut/3119.
One line republications in French : www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/2011b/,
www.researchgate.net/publication/269675493.
Table of contents
Abstract ....................................................................................................................... 1
1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 2
2. The teacher, an engineer who designs didactic devices ................................................... 2
3. The three levels of didactic engineering ........................................................................ 4
3.1 The "micro" level .................................................................................................. 4
3.2 The "meso" level .................................................................................................. 5
3.3 The "macro" level ................................................................................................. 6
4. Available elements of didactic engineering in language-culture didactics ........................... 7
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 9
Afterword of February 2011 .......................................................................................... 11
Appendix - Primary procedure of the didactic design ........................................................ 12
Abstract
Within the framework of the theme of this conference entitled "Language teachers, project
engineers", I will limit my intervention to the devices conceived by the teacher in the space of
the class with an explicit principal objective of teaching-learning of the foreign language-culture,
whether this device corresponds to the whole of its project, or whether it corresponds to a
didactic exploitation in the classroom of project activities carried out outside the classroom
(exploitation of documents collected or experiences lived during a professional internship abroad,
for example), or conversely to a preparation in the classroom of projects which will then be
carried out in the field. More precisely, I will focus on a form of device that is as central as it is
unavoidable, namely the didactic unit, which, I will show, assumes indispensable functions,
whereas it poses a problem when the teacher implements pedagogical projects: the combination
of the two formats constitutes a real "problematic": in conclusion, I will not propose any
solution(s), but rather possible modes of management.
2
1. Introduction
In their call for papers, APLIUT officials write that language teachers in LANSAD programs in
general and in IUTs in particular are called upon to implement project engineering "which
concerns all types of projects: research projects, pedagogical projects, equipment or partnership
projects.
1
For my part, I will only deal with the engineering of pedagogical projects
2
. I apologize for
proposing an inaugural conference that does not cover the overall theme of this APLIUT
Congress. I have had some experience with "research projects" in my career, but they were in
the field of didactics of languages and cultures, and I have no experience with equipment or
partnership projects in a LANSAD context. So, I limited myself for this conference to my
competences, in order to continue to invalidate - at least as far as I am concerned - the famous
Peters' law, which, applied to my case, could be stated in the following way: a speaker is
constantly invited to intervene in congresses and colloquiums until he finally accepts to do one
that has led him to cross his first level of incompetence...
My reflection will thus be limited to the devices conceived by the teacher in the space of the
class with an explicit principal objective of teaching-learning of the foreign language-culture,
whether this device corresponds to the whole of its project, or whether it corresponds to a
didactic exploitation in the classroom of project activities carried out outside the classroom
(exploitation of documents collected or experiences lived during a professional internship abroad,
for example), or conversely to a preparation in the classroom of projects which will then be
carried out in the field. More precisely, I will focus on a form of device that is as central as it is
unavoidable (and we will see why), namely the didactic unit, which I will show to be
indispensable, while posing a problem when the teacher implements pedagogical projects: the
combination of the two formats constitutes a real "problem": in conclusion, I will not propose
any solution(s), but rather possible modes of management
2. The teacher, an engineer who designs didactic devices
It is common in general pedagogy to define the teacher by the different functions he/she
assumes. There are many such models in general pedagogy, but in language-culture didactics,
it seems to me that his basic functions are the following
3
:
–transmission of knowledge: as a specialist in the language-culture and its teaching, the
teacher brings to the classroom his or her knowledge and the guarantee of this
knowledge;
–learning training: the teacher is also a learning specialist, who must progressively train
the learners in order to make them more autonomous;
1
This text is the result of a conference held during the XXXIIe Congress of APLIUT on the theme "Language
teachers, project engineers", IUT de Vannes - June 3, 4 and 5, 2010. It has been published in Les Cahiers
de l'APLIUT. I would like to thank its director for his permission to publish it on my personal website.
2
I should speak here of "didactic" project engineering, since this is the adjective that corresponds to our
discipline, the "didactics of languages and cultures". Nevertheless, I do not have any qualms about the
expression "pedagogical project": because it has become common usage, and especially because it is
certainly the pedagogues, and not the methodologists/didacticians of language-culture, who have invented
and diffused the project as a teaching-learning device.
3
I list them here in a non-hierarchical order: depending on the environment and the time, it will be one or
the other of these functions that will prove to be the priority.
3
–correction of errors: the dominant cognitive theory in our discipline is constructivism,
according to which learning is a permanent deconstruction-reconstruction of the
interlanguage; we learn by hypothesis-testing-error, and correction is therefore essential
for the learner to realize his errors and make new hypotheses and new tests);
–help and guidance: the dominant version of this theory is socioconstructivism, with the
idea that learning takes place in what Vigostky calls the "proximal zone of development";
we learn by doing, thanks to the "scaffolding" in particular of the teacher (his help and
guidance) what we could not do without him;
–animation: the classroom is a collective space and time where the teacher must
necessarily manage group phenomena, organize the alternation between different types
of activities (identification, conceptualization, application, training, etc.) and different
modes of activity (individual, small group or large group);
- design of didactic devices (i.e. of teaching-learning): it is, for some pedagogues and
didacticians, among whom I count myself, the central function, the one to which all the
others are subordinated by putting themselves at its service; we know that design is at
the heart of the engineer's job, and this is why these pedagogues and didacticians mainly
consider the teacher as a designer of didactic devices, the teaching job as "didactic
engineering
For my part, I base my conception of the didactics of languages and cultures - its epistemology
- on three reference authors:
- Edgar MORIN, French sociologist and philosopher, for his complex epistemology
4
: the object
of the didactics of languages and cultures, namely the interrelated and situated processes of
teaching-learning, is indeed complex in nature;
- Richard RORTY, an American philosopher, for his pragmatist epistemology, which seems to me
to be particularly suitable for the management of the relationship between language-culture
didactics and the so-called "reference theories", in particular the pedagogical, linguistic,
cognitive and cultural models (for the latter, it is those proposed by cultural anthropology,
sociology, philosophy,...); he thus considers that practice does not have to be considered as a
degradation of theory, but that on the contrary theory must be considered as an auxiliary of
practice.
5
- Herbert SIMON, for his epistemology of engineering. This author is probably little known to
language teachers, but he is famous in other fields: he received the "Turing Medal" (the "Nobel
Prize for Computer Science") in 1975 for his research on Artificial Intelligence and Cognition
Science, and the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1978. In particular, in 1969 he published
a book entitled Sciences des systèmes, sciences de l'artificiel (Systems Sciences, Sciences of the
Artificial)
6
, in which he defined the engineer as a designer of artifacts - hence his definition of
the engineering sciences as "sciences of the artificial". Now, the teaching-learning devices in a
language classroom are artifacts intended not only to make up for the absence of natural
4
Cf. in particular his Introduction à la pensée complexe, ESF éditeur, Paris, 1990, 160 p.
5
Cf. in particular L'espoir au lieu du savoir. Introduction au pragmatisme, trans. Paris, Albin Michel (coll.
"Bibliothèque internationale de philosophie"), 1995, 158 p
6
Herbert A. SIMON, Sciences des systèmes, sciences de l'artificiel, translated from English by J.-L.
Lemoigne, Paris, Dunod (coll. "afcet Système"), 1991, 230 p. [1e ed. the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969, 1981].
4
acquisition - of a "linguistic bath" - but also to avoid its risks; in the same way that a bridge is
an artifact designed by an engineer to avoid the need to swim across rivers.
Given the historical significance of the metaphor of the "linguistic bath" in our discipline, one can
see where I am going with this metaphor of the bridge, which I oppose to it: the main interest
of a language class lies in its very artificiality; in its capacity to propose artificial devices which
will guide and help the learners in their journey between the two shores of their mother tongue
and the foreign language, to facilitate their displacements within their "interlanguage". The
simonian epistemology of engineering, applied to the didactics of languages and cultures, allows
us to break with the project of the communicative approach, which consisted, on the contrary,
in transforming the classroom into a linguistic mini-bath, through the systematic use of
"simulation". Some drown in the great linguistic waters (the brutal dive into a foreign country),
others, on the contrary, do not find their account because the river is reduced to a small net
(that of reduced class hours). This is the genius of the engineer of the bridges and roads: to
make a work of art which makes it possible to pass from one bank to the other as well when the
river is in flood, as when its bed is dry...
I also like the way in which a French teacher of German spun the metaphor of the linguistic bath
at the end of the 19th century:
How many people ignore grammar! For many, it is enough to throw children into the
middle of the German language, just as one throws people into the water to teach them
to swim, as the proverb says. And first of all, this proverb seems to us to be one of those
which it would be perhaps dangerous to take literally; but moreover, the comparison does
not seem to us to be exact. Where can we take this full load of German? Not in the
classroom, of course. A glass of water is not a river; and if it is said that one can drown
in a glass of water, we have not yet heard that one can learn to swim in it. The German
language only flows freely on the other side of the Rhine. Do we want to take all our
students there?
7
GIRARD M. " De la Méthode dans les Classes Élémentaires [III] ", Revue de
l'enseignement des langues vivantes, n° 5, July 1884, pp. 143-146.
3. The three levels of didactic engineering
We can consider that there are three levels of didactic engineering:
3.1 The "micro" level
Is that of the "tasks" in the sense that I attribute to this term, that of units of meaning within
the learning action. I had addressed this level in my lecture at a previous APLIUT congress, held
on 5-7 June 2003 in Auch, entitled "From the task-based approach to the co-actional
perspective", and which was published in the issue of the Cahiers de l'APLIUT that collected the
proceedings of that congress.
8
In particular, I proposed a typology of tasks based on their main
orientation, which can be identified by their first evaluation criterion: tasks can be oriented
towards communication, language, procedure, process, result or product. This is, of course, an
essential level for designing learning activities.
7
One will appreciate the cleverness of the last question, which was felt to be totally rhetorical at a time
when France was bathed in acute "revanchism" after its 1870 defeat by Prussia, and the loss of Alsace-
Lorraine.
8
PUREN Christian, " De l'approche par les tâches à la perspective co-actionnelle ". Proceedings of the XXVe
APLIUT Congress, 5-7 June 2003 in Auch, Les Cahiers de l'APLIUT (revue de l'Association des Professeurs
de langues des Instituts Universitaires de Technologie), vol. XXIII, n° 1, February 2004, pp. 10-26.
5
3.2 The "meso" level
This is the level of what is traditionally called the "didactic unit" (or "lesson") in language
textbooks
9
.
This level is just as essential as the micro level of the tasks. At this medium level, in fact, didactic
units perform at least four absolutely essential functions:
a) The didactic units divide the totality of the contents and learning objectives into
portions which can be arranged in a progressive manner in a rational pathway marked
out and controlled by intermediate objectives and periodic evaluations. Let's take the
example of a 50-hour course: it would not be possible to propose a single evaluation, the
one that would correspond to the final certification at the end of the 50 hours. Both
learners and teachers need to check regularly along the way whether their course is
progressing correctly and at a good pace.
On this point, the structure of the didactic units, whatever it may be, is the emerging
point (for the learners, and in the textbooks) of what I call the "primary procedure of the
didactic design": cf. diagram below, and the appendix of this article for more details.
Primary procedure of the didactic design (in French)
In the emerging part of this procedure, we find the famous ternary structure of the
didactic unit that the Anglo-Saxons designate by the acronym "PPP", Presentation -
Practice - Production: to "Presentation" correspond, in my model, "Presentation" and
"Explication “(explanation); to Practice, "Exploitation" and "Exercisation” (Exercising).
10
b) The didactic units, as their name indicates, bring unity, that is to say coherence,
between the different areas of didactic activity, which happen to be numerous and
heterogeneous: oral and written comprehension, oral and written production, grammar,
lexicon, phonetics, culture. It would be no more feasible to spend the 50 hours of this
course simply lining up a series of juxtaposed tasks with no link between them. In this
same conference in Auch in 2003 (and in the corresponding article), I presented the
different principles of didactic unity that have been successively privileged in the course
of the history of language-culture didactics. It is always a "unicity", which is always
announced in the titles of these units: unicity...
–... of the grammar point: Of the article, Of the plural of nouns, Declension of
nouns, Of prepositions, ...) ;
–... of the lexical theme: The classroom, The yard, The house, The town square,
... ;
–... of the cultural theme: Imágenes de España, Países de América, Mundo actual,
Fiestas,... ;
9
"Meso" is a neologism of Greek origin synonymous with "intermediate", "middle".
10
Certainly missing from this "PPP" model is the framework in which it must necessarily be included to be
coherent, namely evaluation in its three moments and three functions (diagnostic, formative and
summative).
6
–... of the communication situation, symbolized by the place of communication:
At the window, In the elevator, In the street, At the post office,... ;
–... of action, well, for the last few years: We are going to organize a birthday
party, We are going to organize a group vacation, We are going to elaborate a
guide for better living, We are going to make a cookbook.
c) The didactic units synergize the different tasks proposed to the learners in these
different areas, so that they reinforce each other. It would not be more feasible in this
50-hour course to group the tasks by type, spending for example 10 hours on presenting
documents, 10 hours on exploiting them, 10 hours on language exercises, and then 10
hours on communicative tasks. Let's take the example of the standard procedure for
teaching grammar at school (which appeared with the direct methodology of the
beginning of the XXe century), and which is "secondary" to the previous one, since it only
concerns one part of it, the "exercise":
Secondary procedure of the didactic design
(the one applied to the grammar and vocabulary activities)
It is the articulation of these different tasks, applied successively to each of the selected
grammatical structures, that is supposed to gradually bring the learners to a sufficient
level of mastery of this structure so that they can reuse it for their personal expression.
d) The didactic units, finally, ensure the indispensable intensive repetition of a limited
number of language and cultural contents, without which learning is not possible, by
concentrating all the activities on these same contents in a limited time. It would be no
more feasible, still in the same 50-hour course, to provide for only one appearance of
each newly introduced linguistic form, and only one opportunity for learners to reuse it.
The most commonly used device for what is also called "re-talk" is the didactic integration
from and about a single document, authentic text or manufactured dialogue. The
audiovisual didactic unit of the first and second generations
11
seems to be very different
from the French explanation of texts, but it has the same device of maximum didactic
integration: a single document serves as a support for all the activities programmed
within the didactic unit.
3.3 The "macro" level
Is that of the didactic projects, which will necessarily take place over at least several weeks, or
even several months or an entire year.
However, if there is a perfect compatibility between the micro level of the tasks and the meso
level of the didactic unit (the function of the latter is precisely to put the various tasks in
11
See pages 354-356 of my Histoire des méthodologies de l'enseignement des langues (Nathan-CLE
international, 1988, 448 p. Available online on the APLV website: http://www.aplv-
languesmodernes.org/spip.php?article813.
7
coherence and in synergy), this compatibility does not exist a priori between the didactic units
and the project (a project is not a set of didactic units: that is the definition of a textbook!)
I will take two concrete examples that illustrate the difficulty of combining the two different
temporalities, that of the didactic unit and that of the pedagogical project:
–The first example is borrowed from an FLE manual for teenage beginners (level A1)
12
. In Unit
4 (of a total of 6), learners are asked to imagine and draw their class mascot. In this case,
however, it is obvious that the specific evaluation criterion for the projects –their level of
success- can only be applied at the end of the course: only if this mascot is still a mascot for all
the students at that time can it be said that it has really been the class mascot.
–The second example is taken from another FLE manual for older teenagers and adults aimed
at level B2
13
. It is written in the Foreword of this manual (p. 3): "At the end of each unit, a
"Workshops" page gathers tasks-projects to be carried out in groups, so that learners can
actively reuse the knowledge acquired throughout the unit, calling upon their creativity."
In Unit 3 of this manual, the following "project task" is proposed among others:
4. Classroom Journal
Class discussion on the name of the newspaper.
Each day, a student (or a pair of students) writes an article on the events that took place
in the city, choosing a photo.
The newspaper is published at the end of the fortnight or month.
This project, as we can see, does not "fit" in the unit, and could not fit in any unit: one wonders
why a class journal should only start in unit 3, and if it is continued afterwards, it will necessarily
be interesting for the learners to reuse the acquisitions of the following units as well
In their 1993 book entitled Pour une pédagogie du projet
14
, Isabelle BORDALLO and Jean-Paul
GINESTET, following all the specialists in the field, point out as the main danger of pedagogical
projects that of "productive drift"
15
(p. 148). 148): the success of the projects (in particular the
quality of the final production, when this is the case) takes precedence over the learning of the
language-culture, whereas these projects - at least those organized by the language teachers -
should remain in part a pretext for this learning, and not be an objective in themselves. The
problem seems to me to be particularly acute in the case of projects organized by language
teachers in the LANSAD sector (to which these authors do not refer), because the projects there
necessarily have an objective other than language learning, namely that of professionalization.
4. Available elements of didactic engineering in language-culture didactics
Hence the problematic implicit in the title of my conference ("Pedagogical project and
engineering of the didactic unit"), and which can be defined by the following question: how to
combine these two different scales of conception of didactic devices? And by a second, non-
subsidiary question: does a "differential" in the technological sense of the term (a mechanism
that manages the difference in speed of rotation of the front wheels when a front-wheel drive
12
Sac à dos 1, Céline HIMBER, Charlotte RASTELLO, Fabienne GALLON, Hachette, 2006.
13
Édito. Méthode de français, Élodie HEU, Jean-Jacques MABILAT, Didier, 2006.
14
Isabelle BORDALLO & Jean-Paul GINESTET, Pour une pédagogie du projet, Paris : Hachette-Éducation,
192 p.
15
I would have said "productivist drift", but "productive drift" is indeed the expression generally used by
pedagogues.
8
car takes a turn) exist in cultural language didactics, that is to say, a system that can
simultaneously manage these two temporal scales, that of the project and that of the didactic
unit?
More prosaically, the question, as global as it is concrete, is the following: how to exploit in class
the activities carried out during the out-of-class projects, and conversely, how to orient the
projects in such a way as to allow this exploitation?
In the classroom, as we have seen, it is not yet possible to see how it would be possible to do
without didactic units. To return to the metaphor of the differential, it is the overall didactic
coherence in force –what I call a "didactic configuration", which should normally provide this
adaptation mechanism allowing this two-way articulation between out-of-class project
16
and
classroom activities.
I have presented and illustrated this concept of "didactic configuration" in detail in a lecture
available on the Internet as a PowerPoint presentation with sound.
17
I will also go into more
detail in my first workshop this afternoon.
Very briefly, here: a didactic configuration is a coherent set of elements that have been
"configured" in relation to each other
18
from a new social situation of reference (i.e. the situation
that we want to train learners to be able to manage in a foreign language-culture). These
elements are those that appear in the column headings of the table that I use to present the
historical evolution of the different configurations over the last century:
Social situation of reference
Reference social competences
Social actions
of reference
School tasks
of reference
Corresponding didactic
constructions
language
cultural
However, from a didactic point of view, we currently have four simultaneously active "didactic
configurations" (sorry...). These are the ones that give us the "didactic engineering elements"
currently available.
The first configuration, which corresponds in school didactics to direct and active methodologies,
provides two models of didactic unit:
–didactic integration from and about a single document (applied at the time, at the
beginning of the 20th century, this model is implemented in the "explication de textes à
la française";
–the "civilization file", which brings together different documents on a single theme.
16
It is difficult to see how, in a LANSAD type of training, the projects could be limited to the didactic space
of the language class...
17
This conference can be accessed from my personal website (http://www.christianpuren.com) under the
heading "Travaux personnels", at the following entry: 2010g. "The new actional perspective of social action
with regard to the historical evolution of the didactics of language-cultures". [See also a commented version
of this model of the historical evolution of didactic configurations in the section “Bibliothèque de travail” >
Document n° 029].
18
Exactly in the sense that a computer can be described as a "coherent configuration" if its various
components (processor, graphics card, mass storage, screen, software, etc.) are adapted to each other for
optimum efficiency according to the needs and uses of users, as intended by its designers.
9
The second configuration, which corresponds to the communicative approach, strongly
destructures the didactic unit (it mixes the different phases of the canonical model of the didactic
unit, which the Anglo-Saxons call the "PPP model" (Presentation-Practice-Production) in the
service of the two privileged devices: the immediate interaction between learners and the
simulation (by which one wants to escape from the classroom situation).
The third configuration, which corresponds to the implementation of what the authors of the
CEFR call "plurilingual and pluricultural competence", is oriented towards the systematic
implementation of mediation competence, i.e. towards activities involving interpretation,
reformulation or translation, such as syntheses or, conversely, explanatory developments, or
even reports and accounts of activities. These mediation activities alone cannot suffice to build
another model of didactic unity, but they are now essential for preparing students for an
increasingly internationalized professional world.
The fourth configuration, that of the actional perspective, which also emerges in the CEFR, is of
particular interest to our problematic, since in its current implementation, the authors of
textbooks seek to integrate the project - which is the activity most in line with the new objective
of training a "social actor" - within the didactic units themselves. This is not an easy undertaking
(it is even paradoxical, for the reasons we have seen above), and it is understandable that these
authors cautiously use the term "task" to designate what they propose at the end of their didactic
units. This is the case, for example, in Rond Point 1 (Difusión, 2004), the first FLE textbook to
claim to be based on the "action approach".
19
The authors of Édito (see references in note 10
above) were inspired by the famous judgment of Solomon in choosing the term "tasks-
projects"... This expression they chose is a perfect illustration of the very real problem of didactic
engineering that textbook designers, but also teachers, are now faced with: how to articulate
and/or combine didactic units and pedagogical projects?
Conclusion
There are a priori two possible strategies to manage this problem of the impossible and yet
necessary combination between the pedagogical project and the didactic unit as they exist and
as we know it. These two strategies are already well attested:
1) The first one consists in reducing the pedagogical project to the dimension of the classical
didactic unit by making it a "final task" which simply replaces the communicativist simulation in
its primary function of situation of reuse of the linguistic forms introduced in this unit. This is the
strategy favored so far by publishers (at least those I know best, those of French as a foreign
language). And we understand them, because the more autonomy the learners have (which is
one of the aims of the pedagogical project), the less work on language and cultural content can
be pre-programmed (yet this pre-programming corresponds to the main function of textbooks).
2) The second consists, on the contrary, in enlarging the didactic unit to the dimension of a mini-
project: this is what is made possible, for example, by "Cyber surveys" (Webquests) and
"scenarios" such as the one implemented for the certification in the Diploma of Language
Competence (DCL, https://www.education.gouv.fr/le-diplome-de-competence-en-langue-dcl-
2978
20
).
19
The subtitle of the textbook is: "A French method based on task-based learning". The expression "final
task" is the one most commonly used by the authors of official French instructions concerning school
language teaching. The adjective "final" has of course the meaning of "at the end of each didactic unit".
20
Link updated November 2022.
10
3) But there is a third strategy, just as logical as the two previous ones, and which consists in
abandoning the didactic unit while integrating - because it remains absolutely essential that they
are assured - its different functions in the very conception and management of the pedagogical
projects.
11
Afterword of February 2011
Strategy n° 3 presented above is certainly the most "elegant" because it is the most coherent
with the project pedagogy, but it is also the one that will inevitably require the most work from
the teacher, and moreover work during the project, depending on its progress.
There is another, arguably more comfortable strategy:
4) Classroom work is done in parallel on didactic units and on projects, in a "compartmentalized"
manner: the language progression and the activities centered on the language (grammar and
lexicon, in particular) are done following the textbook, the pedagogical projects being centered
on the learners (their autonomy, their motivation) and on the cultural contents
5) And finally, there is a fifth type of strategy, which consists of switching from one to the other
of the four preceding strategies according to convenience. Beware in this case of the "dispersion"
effect for the learners... and the high management cost for the teacher. But it is undoubtedly
possible to link them together over time.
Let's take a concrete example. In the Version Originale 3 manual (B1, Éditions Maison des
Langues, 2011), there is a teaching unit in the manual on the media. It is Unit 8 entitled "No
news, good news!" whose contents are presented as follows in the general table of contents:
It would probably be possible to propose to the learners, successively:
1) to carry out a webquest on the media (see for example the file on this type of activity
on the Académie de Versailles site – broken link), the results of the research being used
collectively to develop semantic fields on the thematic vocabulary;
2) to study the unit in the textbook, which would ensure in particular the work planned
therein on grammatical resources;
3) to compare the textual typology or cultural content proposed in this unit with what
appears in the documents selected by the learners for their research on the Internet;
4) Finally, if the learners are interested, extend the two tasks proposed in this unit –or
replace them– with a media education project.
Christian Puren, 12/02/2011
12
APPENDIX - PRIMARY PROCEDURE OF THE DIDACTIC DESIGN
Operations
evaluation→
prospective
selection
→
description
→
distribution
→
presentation→
explanation
→
operation /
exercise →
production
→
correction
→
summative
evaluation
formative
evaluation
evaluations
TYPES
(examples)
prior
analysis of
language
needs
speech
analysis
linear
global
explanation of texts “à la française".
argumentatio
n
certificative
semantic
explanation
open/closed
fiscal years
in real
time/repeat
ed
CRITERIA
frequency
simplicity
utility
favorable
context
keywords
active
competence
focus on
meaning
re-use
syntactic
complexity
METHODS
(examples)
needs
analysis
distributional
analysis
didactic unit
fabricated oral
dialogue
synonymy
repetitive
method
articulatory
method
debate
deviation from
the average
TOOLS
(examples)
frequency
list
grammar
book
official
programs
tape recorder
dictionary
workbook
self-
correcting
file
role-playing
framework
competency
descriptors
1. Definition of the different operations
evaluation: an operation consisting in collecting information by quantitative measurement and/or qualitative assessment of learners'
productions, either before a teaching/learning sequence to help in its design ("prospective evaluation" or "diagnostic evaluation"), or during a
sequence to help in its management ("formative evaluation"), or at the end of a sequence to assess it ("summative evaluation").
selection: operation consisting in choosing the linguistic forms or the cultural facts that one has decided to teach. It can be made on explicit
criteria, like that of the Fundamental French, at the end of the 50s, on the frequency, distribution and distribution.
description: operation consisting in applying to linguistic forms and cultural facts a common model of understanding: for example etymology or
a semantic field for the lexicon, morphosyntactic grammar for the sentence, textual grammar for the texts, etc.
distribution or gradation: operation consisting in chronologically distributing the linguistic forms and the cultural facts retained by
selection.
progression: special case of distribution, defined according to explicit and rational criteria such as known→ unknown, simple→ compound,
simple→ complex, easy→ difficult, frequent→ rare, more useful→ less useful, standard language→ specialty language, standard register→ special
register, etc.
13
presentation: 1. the process of introducing a new linguistic form for the first time (orally or in writing, by the teacher, the textbook or a
learner). In audio-visual methodology, for example, this is done through the initial listening of the basic dialogue. 2. Any organized mode of
presentation of a linguistic form: dialogue, focus, alphabetical list, semantic field, morphological constants, etymological family, etc.
explanation: action aimed at helping students access meaning or significance ("semantic explanation"), or at conceptualizing the regularities or
rules of language ("metalinguistic explanation").
exercising: from narrow, directed exercises (e.g., recitation of memorized texts or paradigms) to more open-ended exercises (e.g., role-
playing from an outline)
production: it corresponds to situations where the learner will be able to re-use the language forms introduced in the didactic unit with others
acquired beforehand for his personal expression in a communication situation (in audiovisual methodology, this corresponds to the final phase
called "free expression")
correction: operation consisting in informing the learner of the conformity of his production to different types of rules (phonological, syntactic,
morphological, cultural, etc.)
2. These different operations apply to the ten teaching/learning areas:
1. oral comprehension
2. written comprehension,
3. oral expression
4. written expression
5. culture
6. grammar
7. lexicon
8. phonetics
9. phonics-graphics relationship (spelling, punctuation, presentation)
10. learning methodology
The examples given in the table above are for different areas.
Note: The complete version of this document is available in French (Document 034).