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HOW TO MAKE THE UNITY OF THE DIDACTIC UNITS?
HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE MODES OF COHERENCE
OF THE DIDACTIC UNITS IN DIDACTICS OF LANGUAGES-CULTURES
By Christian PUREN
christian.puren@univ-st-etienne.fr
Table of contents
Abstract ................................................................................................................................................ 1
Introduction .................................................................................................................. 2
1. The grammar approach .............................................................................................. 3
2. The lexical approach .................................................................................................. 3
3. The cultural approach ................................................................................................. 4
4. The communicative approach ...................................................................................... 5
5. The action-oriented approach ...................................................................................... 7
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 9
Appendix 1. Historical evolution of approaches in foreign language teaching in France ......... 10
Appendix 2. Cours de langue et de civilisation françaises 1er et 2e degrés (1953], Unité 24 ... 11
Text taken from the conference given of November 2, 2004 at the Annual Congress of the
Association pour le DÉveloppement de l’Allemand en France (ADÉAF), École Supérieure de
Commerce de Clermont-Ferrand, 2-3 November 2004. Published in Le nouveau bulletin de
l'ADEAF n° 89, April 2005, pp. 40-51.
Version française disponible : « L'évolution historique des approches en didactique des langues-
cultures, ou comment faire l'unité des "unités didactiques" »,
www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/2004c/.
Abstract
The domains of activity to be combined within the didactic units of language textbooks are
numerous and heterogeneous: they are grammar, lexicon, phonetics, comprehension and
production in writing and speaking, culture and methodology (this last domain corresponding to
the objective "teaching-learning to learn"). The consequence is that a constant problematic,
during the history of the didactics of languages-cultures, is that of the way in which one can put
in coherence these different domains so as to put them in synergy, in other words, of the way
in which one builds the unity of the didactic unit. Until the beginning of the 1960s in France, until
the audiovisual methodology, the way was always the same, namely that one chose one of the
domains to begin the didactic unit, to "enter" it ("approaches" has in this article this sense of
"entries"): the didactic units of the textbooks began successively by the grammar, then by the
lexicon, then by the culture. The input used later to create the unity of the didactic units was a
communication situation, and finally the action (with an action to be prepared throughout the
didactic unit). In conclusion, the author argues that all these inputs must now be combined or
articulated differently in complex classroom sequences: "their unity is to be made, unmade and
remade continuously".
2
Christian PUREN, “The historical evolution of approaches in language-culture didactics,
or how to make the unity of ‘didactic units’"
Introduction
Language teachers must constantly perform three interrelated operations in particular:
1) Because they cannot teach everything, they must constantly retain and discard; whether it is
to define the contents of a year or a term, to choose the documents that will be part of what is
called in French, "un dossier de civilisation" (i.e. a dossier of authentic documents on a cultural
theme), to select the grammar points that will be worked on from a dialogue, or again, in real
time in class, to decide which phonetic errors will be corrected or not at the end of a student's
oral intervention. In language and culture didactics, this is called the selection operation.
2) Because they have to ensure a coherence of teaching, they have to divide the flow of this
process into parts whose contents present a certain cohesion, i.e. into "didactic units" (we still
sometimes speak of "lessons"). Curiously, as far as I know, this fundamental operation has not
been given a proper name in our discipline. I propose to speak of "sequenciation", a term that
has the triple advantage of corresponding to that of "didactic sequence", now in common use,
of integrating the temporal dimension (cf. below the operation of "distribution"), and finally of
reminding us that the operations of cutting up are done in relation to a whole that must never
be lost from sight: a film sequence has its own unit, but this one is part of a more global unit in
which it finds all its meaning. In other words, the necessary segmentation must not lead to
fragmentation.
3) Because they cannot teach everything at the same time, they must rationally distribute these
different units over time, i.e. distribute them chronologically according to a chaining principle.
This operation is called "distribution" in language and culture didactics. When the principle used
to do this is pedagogical –i.e. supposed to facilitate the student's progress– we generally speak
of "progression" (from the known to the unknown, from the similar to the different, from the
concrete to the abstract, from the simple to the compound, from the easy to the difficult, etc.).
These three operations are complex to carry out because they are interrelated, because they
must be carried out within a logic of teaching but also of learning, and last but not least, because
they must be carried out in our discipline in very heterogeneous "domains" which themselves
correspond to major a priori divisions of the object of teaching and learning. These divisions
have evolved over the course of the history of our discipline, but we are all familiar with those
that constitute our professional heritage today: (1) grammar, (2) lexicon, (3) phonetics, (4-7)
written and oral comprehension and production, (8) culture; areas to which are added for certain
languages (9) the graphical-phonic relationship
1
, and for all of them, officially since the
Programs of December 1995 for the first cycle, (10) the "disciplinary methodological domain" in
which "the student at the end of the third cycle must have a certain autonomy".
It is precisely these different domains that will be used as principles of coherence of the didactic
unit until the 1960s. One will attribute to one of them the function of putting in coherence of the
whole, the unity of the didactic unit resting thus successively, during our history, on the
uniqueness of the grammar point, of the lexical theme then of the cultural theme. I will speak
here of "approaches" in the sense that one speaks of "global approach to texts", i.e. of the
domain retained to enter this text (in this example, it is a type of reading comprehension). In
previous articles, I have used the spatial metaphor of the "entrance" to designate this function
of coherence, in the sense of the domain chosen to enter a limited territory (that of the didactic
sequence) within which various paths are laid out between the other domains. Like these
monumental entrances occupying almost the entire facade of official buildings which, like all
large multifunctional buildings, contain the same types of rooms, corridors... and service
entrances. What serves as facades to our didactic units are their titles, and it is clear that
1
For languages like English or French, for example. I leave aside the cases of languages such as Chinese
and Japanese –and to a lesser extent Arabic–, where spelling is in itself an additional domain of its own.
3
between "The imperfect subjunctive", "The kitchen" and "The Mexican revolution", we clearly
pass from one type of architecture to another...
The reader will constantly refer, for the continuation of the reading of this article, to the table
proposed in Appendix 1, a table that I will only comment briefly in the lines that follow, the
essential here being the perception of the overall movement.
1. The grammar approach
In the traditional methodology, the title and the unity of the "lesson" were given by the grammar
point that was treated in it, and the teaching progression followed the canonical order of the
morphosyntactic grammar of reference, which was consequently borrowed as a distribution
principle. For a long time, at least until the end of the XIXth century (and sometimes until the
1950s in Italy and Spain) what we now call language "textbooks" were still called "grammars".
This is the case of Charles MARQUARD SAUER's New Spanish Grammar published by Groos,
Heidelberg-Paris, in 1882, and entitled on the title page Gaspey-Otto-Sauer Method (this new
name of "method", with more modernist connotations, was later imposed). The preface reads:
The method of this book is based on a combination of theory and practice. Numerous reading,
translation and conversation exercises constantly support the rules, which set out the essential
precepts of the language in a logical and rational order, and in a succinct and lucid manner.
And the titles of the first lessons are as follows:
1e leçon: De l'article (The article)
2e leçon: Du pluriel des substantifs (The Plural of Nouns)
3e leçon: Déclinaison des substantifs (Noun Declension)
4e leçon: Prépositions (Prepositions)
5e leçon: Le substantif sans article (partitif) - The noun without an article (partitive)
6e leçon: Des finales augmentatives et diminutives (Augmentative and Diminutive Finals)
7e leçon: Des noms propres (Proper Names)
8e leçon: Le verbe auxiliaire haber - The auxiliary verb haber (to have)
2. The lexical approach
With the direct methodology, a first fundamental break occurred, since one passed from an
approach based on form (grammar) to an approach based on meaning (the lexicon). The
instruction of September 13, 1890, which proposed for the very beginning of teaching the
technique of the "word lesson" –borrowed from the "lesson of things" which had been imposed
at the time in the renewed pedagogy of French as a mother tongue in elementary school– begins
with this sentence: "The first thing to be given to the pupil is the elements of the language, that
is to say, the words". The unity of the didactic unit is henceforth ensured by the uniqueness of
the thematic vocabulary, from which the titles of the lessons are borrowed, as in the following
example from a textbook of the 1900s:
1e leçon: La salle de classe (The classroom)
2e leçon : La cour (The yard)
3e leçon : La maison (The house)
4e leçon: La place de la ville (The place of the city)
5e leçon: Le bazar (The Bazaar)
6e leçon : Le parc de la ville (The city park)
7e leçon: Le jardin d’agrément (The pleasure garden)
8e leçon : Le jardin potager (The vegetable garden)
9e leçon: Le marché (The market)
10e leçon: Les métiers (The trades)
The principle of distribution will also be borrowed from the new pedagogy of the primary school
and its principles of progression: these are the "centers of interest" which start from the person
4
of the pupil hic et nunc, in the classroom, and which move away from it progressively, first within
the physical world, then passing to the world of society ("commerce", "social life",...) and finally
to the world of ideas ("qualities and defects",...). Here is how this principle is presented in the
continuation of the same instruction of September 13, 1890:
The only rule to observe is to use only concrete words that correspond to objects that the
student has in front of him, or at least that he has seen and that he can easily put in front
of his imagination. If the school has tables for lessons on things, we should not fail to
take advantage of them. To the nouns, one will immediately add some adjectives
expressing external qualities, such as shape, size, color. What is missing to form small
propositions? The third person of the present indicative of the verb to be, and, with two
very simple questions: What is this? We will go around the school room, the
courtyard, the father's house, the city and the country. (I underline.)
It should be noted in passing, both in the town-country order of this Instruction and in the titles
cited above of the 1900s textbook, that their authors are most certainly city dwellers, unlike the
vast majority of students of the time...
3. The cultural approach
From the beginning of the 1920s
2
, active methodology brought about a strong refocusing on
the cultural objective of language teaching in schools. The coherence of each lesson and the
progression from one lesson to the next became all the more complex to construct since the
contemporary conception of culture required a combination of three heterogeneous approaches:
literary, historical and geographical. One type of text has the remarkable characteristic of combining
these three approaches: it is the travelogue, a genre that was indeed widely used in certain secondary
school textbooks during the period 1920-1960. However, this genre, which was probably too marked
and not very motivating for students, was eventually supplanted by the novel, probably because
it was the most versatile in terms of didactic approaches: one can indeed extract descriptive,
narrative and/or narrative, and even dialogical texts from it.
This didactic complexity inherent to the cultural approach constitutes the fundamental reason
for which each didactic unit will henceforth be built starting from a single document being used
as support for activities in the totality of the domains, linguistic and cultural. It is the device
known as "maximum didactic integration", where the unity of the didactic unit is given by the
uniqueness of the support document. This "basic support" functions at the same time as a model
of language -–t provides the linguistic forms which will be constantly taken again by the pupils
during their oral commentary– and as a model of culture –it is chosen as highly representative
of its culture of reference to be used as pretext with mobilization by the pupils of previous cultural
knowledge, and with extraction by the pupils or contribution by the teacher of new cultural
knowledge–: It is understandable that literary texts have been massively favored to fulfill such
a function, from the very beginning of learning for the languages that are most immediately
accessible (the neo-Latin languages), as soon as possible for the others. One finds the interest
in this didactic device reaffirmed again in 1985 for all the languages in the Programs of the
colleges:
Progressively enriched practice of the language and the reading, from the fourth year
onwards, of quality texts, introduce students to the civilizations of the countries whose
language they are studying and to the most representative aspects of their cultures.
(Order of November 14, 1985)
Later, partly to allow for a weakening of the didactic integration (to do fewer activities on fewer
domains from and about each of the documents, which allows for their diversification and
specialization, among other things), the didactic unit in culture will be taken in charge at the
level of a grouping of authentic documents (a “dossier de civilization”). As one is never so well
served (or served...) as by oneself, here are the titles of the eight "thematic units" of a Spanish
2
More precisely in the Programs of 1923-1925 (Instruction of September 2, 1925), if we want to take
symbolic dates.
5
textbook “3e LV2” (Year 10, L2) or 1e LV3 (Year 11, L3) belonging to a collection, ¿Qué pasa?
that I directed at Nathan between 1992 and 1996:
1e unité: Juventud (Youth)
2e unité: Las Españas (Spains)
3e unité: Encuentros (Encounters)
4e unité: Temas candentes (Hot topics)
5e unité: Imágenes de España (Images of Spain)
6e unité: Países de América (Countries of America)
7e unité: Mundo actual (Present world)
8e unité: Fiestas (Holidays)
¿Qué pasa? 3e LV2-1e LV3, Yannick MARTIN-SAUDAX, Christian PUREN,
Paris: Nathan, 1992.
Two important remarks are to be made, at this point in our historical journey:
a) When a new "main entry" appears, the others continue to be taken into account
simultaneously (as "service entries", to use the metaphor). Thus, in active textbooks,
constructed texts are developed or literary texts are chosen according to their cultural content,
but also taking into account their lexical and grammatical content.
This is clearly seen in the basic material of unit 24 of Gaston Mauger's Cours de langue et de
civilisation françaises (1st ed. 1953), official textbook of the Alliance Française and world
bestseller of textbooks for teaching French as a foreign language for two decades (see
reproduction in Appendix 2). It should be noted in particular that this basic document clearly
corresponds to a pivotal moment in the historical evolution of approaches to didactic unity in
language teaching, since it ensures at the same time a grammatical (reflexive verbs), lexical
(thematic vocabulary of body care instruments) and cultural (the way of doing one's toilet in
France) unity, and that one sees in it, moreover, the beginning of the dialogue, which will be
later generalized in the audiovisual methodology. The title of this lesson is no longer "Les verbes
réfléchis" (“Reflexive verbs) or "Les instruments de toilette" (Toilet instruments), it corresponds
to a narrative sequence, a unit of story. It is not yet "Dans la salle de bains” (In the bathroom)",
this kind of title will only appear ten years later, in the audio-visual methodology, where the unit
of place will represent the unit of communication.
b) For half a century (1920-1960), the teaching of languages at school in France combined the
lexical approach and the approach through cultural documents, the first dominating in the first
cycle, the second in the second cycle, with a whole transitional phase where the didactic
sequence began, before tackling the text, with a lexical presentation of its vocabulary: this is
the model of didactic unit disseminated and imposed by the instruction of 1er December 1950,
the last major instruction of the active methodology.
4. The communicative approach
In the communicative approach, as its name indicates
3
, we move to an "approach by
communication" which proposes to encompass all the domains in a coherent way. This is the
function of the concept of "communicative competence", defined by its components, among
which are the former domains of grammar (in the "linguistic" component), lexicon (in the
"referential" component) and culture (in the "socio-cultural" component). This communication
approach is already emerging in audiovisual methodology, as can be seen from the titles of the
prototypical first-generation textbook, Voix et Images de France (1961), of which I have selected
and grouped below some significant examples:
3
The expression "communicative approach" has come to designate a constituted methodology (like the
"direct methodology" or the "audiovisual methodology"), and no longer a simple approach as in the
expressions "approach by grammar / by lexicon / by culture", at the risk of forgetting that communication
can only be a "coherent entry", and that activities in the different didactic domains remain indispensable.
6
-----------------------
2e leçon: La maison (The house)
4e leçon: L’appartement (The apartment)
6e leçon: La famille (The Family)
----------------------
9e leçon: À la fenêtre (At the window)
10e leçon: Dans l’ascenseur (In the elevator)
11e leçon: Dans la rue (On the street)
20e leçon: À la poste (At the post office)
25e leçon: Au café (At the café)
26e leçon: À l’hôtel (At the hotel)
27e leçon: Au restaurant (At the restaurant)
------------------------
14e leçon: En rangeant l’armoire (Tidying up the cupboard)
21e leçon: Mme Thibaut fait ses courses (Mrs. Thibaut goes shopping)
22e leçon: M. Robin achète son journal (Mr. Robin buys his newspaper)
------------------------
Voix et Images de France. Paris: CRÉDIF-Didier, 1961.
Alongside titles that still refer to the lexical approach (lessons 2, 4 and 6), more titles of places
appear (lessons 9, 10, 11, 20, 25, 26 and 27), which symbolically designate the unit of
communication. Symbolically, because this unit is made larger: a bit like in classical tragedy, it
corresponds at the same time to a unit of place, time, characters and theme (this time in the
sense of "theme of conversation"); a basic audiovisual dialogue is the same characters in the
same place exchanging in a limited time a finite set of replicas on the same subject.
The places chosen are often at first for their functional dimension, so as to maintain the previous
lexical approach: at the post office, the characters buy stamps, post mail or pick up a package;
at the café, they order different drinks; at the restaurant, they choose between the different
dishes on the menu; in the street, they talk about the traffic. But there is a change of approach,
as the innovative title "In the elevator" clearly shows: one cannot imagine this place as a pretext
for the presentation of any thematic vocabulary; it can only correspond, for the corresponding
dialogue, to a "simple" and therefore real communication space.
It should be noted that this new approach through communication does not in itself provide clear
principles of selection or distribution. Some textbooks (e.g. Grand Large, Clelia PACCAGNINO
and Marie-Laure POLETTI, Paris: Hachette-FLE, 1987) already at this time use a technique that
undoubtedly has a bright future, because it is particularly well suited to the new action-based
approach (see below), that of the scenario: the students follow the successive adventures of the
same characters from one unit to the next.
The titles of the last series (lessons 14, 21 and 22) are even more innovative, so much so that
they will not be exploited as such and will not give rise to any descendants in the audiovisual
methodology: they in fact announce this last approach through action.
Before coming to it, I simply mention in passing the case, in the 1980s and 1990s, of certain
communicative textbooks whose authors chose to display, if not to base the coherence of the
didactic units on language concepts or functions:
Dossier #1: Qui êtes-vous ?(Who are you?)
Dossier #2: Qui sont-ils ? (Who are they?)
Dossier #3: Où est-ce ? (Where is it?)
Dossier #4: Où vont-ils ? (Where are they going?)
Dossier # 5: Que voulez-vous ? (What do you want?)
Espaces 1, Guy CAPELLE, Noëlle GIDON, Paris : Hachette, 1990.
7
“Identity” (dossiers 1 and 2), “place” (dossiers 3 and 4), “to ask” (dossier 5): this is indeed a
return to a traditional approach through grammar, even if it is the new notional-functional
grammar of the moment.
5. The action-oriented approach
In the 2001 Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR, 1st provisional edition 1996),
the shift to a new approach is underway, an “action-oriented approach” outlined in chapter 2.1
(pp. 15 ff.). The driving force behind the change is the evolution of the social objective of
reference for language teaching/learning in Europe:
a) As long as the social objective of reference was to prepare students for contact with foreign
language-culture documents, the coherence of teaching could be based on didactic integration,
in which the teacher organizes his or her teaching tasks in a concentric way from and about a
single document.
b) When the social objective of reference became that of preparing students to meet occasionally
with native speakers of the foreign language-culture (during occasional trips, especially for
tourism), the communicative approach appeared (work of the Council of Europe in the early
1970s, with the different threshold levels), which was developed according to this new objective:
when one meets people one does not know, the natural issue is communication, in the sense of
exchange of information. This exchange is certainly modulated by the effects produced in the
interlocutors by the information they receive, but this "interaction" is fundamentally an action of
each on the other, and not an action with the other, as in the third model below.
c) The "action-oriented approach" of the CEFR corresponds to the taking into account of a new
social objective linked to the progress of European integration, that of preparing learners to live
and work, in their own country or in a foreign country, with native speakers of different foreign
languages and cultures (as is already the case, for example, in companies in Germany where
Germans, Spaniards, and French people work together in English). It is no longer a question of
communicating with the other (of informing oneself and others) but of acting with the other in a
foreign language. Language is no longer (or no longer only) an instrument of communication,
but an instrument of social action.
This latter action-based approach has begun to appear in recent years in the titles of teaching
materials, especially for early education, for which it is particularly well suited: children, in fact,
are motivated neither by a particular language nor by a particular culture in itself, but to do
interesting things: a teacher teaching a foreign language to children is first and foremost a
pedagogue who puts the pupils into activity, and who introduces language and culture as
instruments of action (and not only of communication).
For example, here are the titles of the six didactic units in Busy Box (2002), meaningfully named
"projects":
1. Les héros. Réaliser un poster de ses héros préférés (Heroes. Make a poster of your
favorite heroes.)
2. Les animaux. Enregistrer une émission de radio sur les animaux (Animals. Record a
radio program about animals.)
3. Joyeux Noël. Préparer un spectacle de Noël (Merry Christmas. Prepare a Christmas
show.)
4. Bon anniversaire. Fêter un anniversaire à l'école (Happy Birthday. Celebrating a
birthday at school.)
5. La nourriture. Faire ses courses en anglais (Food. Shopping in English.)
6. Mini-Olympiades. Organiser des mini-Olympiades à l’école (Mini-Olympics. Organize
mini-Olympics at school.)
Busy Box, D. BOURDAIS, S. FINNIE, Paris : Éditions multicolores, 2002.
Another example, this time in French as a foreign language: Rond-Point 1 (Josiane LABASCOULE,
Philippe LIRIA, Maria Rita RODRIGUEZ and Corinne ROYER, Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de
8
Grenoble, 2004) is advertised on the front cover as a "French method based on task-based
learning", and in its preface it claims to be based on the Council of Europe's action approach.
The titles of the Units (imposed by the publisher?) are not particularly well chosen (to use a
gentle euphemism...):
Unit 1. Qui sommes-nous ? (Who are we?)
Unit 2. Elle est très sympa (She is very nice)
Unit 3. En route ! (Let's go!)
Unit 4. Levez une jambe ! (Raise a leg!)
Unit 5. Vous parlez italien ? (Do you speak Italian?)
Unit 6. Ça coûte combien ? (How much does it cost?)
Unit 7. Salé ou sucré ? (Salty or sweet?)
Unit 8: En train ou en avion ? (By train or by plane?)
Unit 9: On vit bien ici ! (We live well here!)
And you have to read the subtitles to find the justification for this action-oriented approach that
the authors claim:
Unit 1. Nous allons avoir un premier contact avec la langue française et les pays où l’on
parle français et nous allons mieux connaître les personnes qui suivent ce cours.
(We will have a first contact with the French language and the countries where
French is spoken and we will get to know the people who are taking this course.)
Unit 2. Nous allons placer à table des invités à un repas de mariage. (We are going to
place guests at a wedding meal.)
Unit 3. Nous allons organiser des vacances en groupe. (We will organize a group
vacation.)
Unit 4. Dans cette unité, nous allons élaborer un guide pour mieux vivre. (In this unit,
we will develop a guide to better living.)
Unit 5. Nous allons sélectionner des candidats pour quatre emplois. (We will select
candidates for four jobs.)
Unit 6. Nous allons organiser une fête d’anniversaire et nous allons chercher des cadeaux
pour nos camarades de classe. (We are going to have a birthday party and get
presents for our classmates.)
Unit 7. Nous allons faire un recueil de cuisine avec nos meilleures recettes. (We will make
a cookbook with our best recipes.)
Unit 8. Dans cette unité, nous allons mettre au point les détails d’un voyage. (In this unit
we will work out the details of a trip.)
Unit 9. Nous allons discuter des problèmes d’une ville et proposer des solutions en
établissant une liste de priorités. (We will discuss the problems of a city and
propose solutions by establishing a list of priorities.)
It is true that no publisher will ever accept such titles... which are not. But why should they
necessarily be?
In addition, the structure of each Level 2 unit (2004) is presented as follows on the PUG website
(http://www.pug.fr/Titre.asp?Num=849, accessed February 24, 2005):
–The ANCHORING section (“la rubrique ANCHRAGE”) provides an initial introduction to
the vocabulary and themes of the unit. It presents the objectives, the grammatical
content of the unit and the task that the students will have to complete under the TARGET
TASK heading.
–The IN CONTEXT section offers documents and activities that are close to the real world
outside the classroom. These documents will allow students to develop real-life
comprehension skills.
–The FORMS AND RESOURCES section helps to systematize the aspects of grammar
necessary to achieve the targeted task.
–The TARGET TASK section (“la rubrique TÂCHE CIBLÉE”) creates a communicative
context where the student will reuse everything they have learned in the previous section.
9
–The CROSSED VIEWS section (“la rubrique “REGARDS CROISÉS”) provides information
on the French-speaking world and invites you to reflect on the contrasts of cultures in
contact.
It is, after the example of the basic text of unit 24 of the 1953 Cours de langue et de civilisation
françaises, on this other example of eclecticism that I wish to conclude this article.
Conclusion
The structure of these units in Rond Point 2, as presented above, reflects all the approaches that
have been successively favored in the history of our discipline: grammar, lexicon, culture,
communication and action. One can criticize the way in which they are ordered, combined or
articulated, and judge that this way will not suit all learners. The essential point is not there,
and this is what we saw in connection with the 1953 Cours de langue et de civilisation françaises,
and which reappears in the design of the units in this textbook as in others published in recent
years: the new approach (in this case, by action) is added to and not substituted for the previous
approaches.
And I do not see how it could be otherwise. The current challenge in our classes is not to
systematically privilege this or that supposedly optimal approach (in particular for the highly
debatable reason that it is the last one...), nor even to build an ideal model of adjustment
between these different approaches, but to permanently apply to them, as to the contents, the
three operations of selection, sequencing and distribution (cf. beginning of this article).
The use of the Internet by the students, for example, is strongly oriented towards an action-
based approach since, even before turning on the computers, they must know what they have
to do in order to decide where to look for which documents, how to select them and how to use
them. Whereas in the culture-based approach the school tasks were legitimately
instrumentalized in the service of the documents, the use of the Internet by the students
themselves requires an action-based approach where, conversely, the documents are
instrumentalized in the service of the tasks.
The sequences
4
to be constructed in the language class will therefore be highly differentiated
and diversified, since they will constantly have to be as appropriate as possible to the students,
the objectives, the teaching/learning devices and situations.
In other words, if didactic units are always needed, their unity is to be made, undone, and redone
constantly.
4
[Note of January 2022]. The didactic sequences correspond to the didactic units of the textbooks as they
are actually implemented in classroom practice. Teachers cannot follow step by step, page by page their
textbook if they want to adapt to the complexity of the teaching-learning process and environment (cf.
PUREN 2015e, "Language Textbooks and Teacher Education," www.christianpuren.com/mes-
travaux/2015e/, Document No. 3, "Scale of Teacher Competence Levels in the Use of Their Textbook"): it
is possible for them, during the same sequence, to arrange "different entries, for all students during the
unit, or for different groups of students (differentiated pedagogy).The entries corresponding to different
methodologies, the implementation of different entries naturally lead them to what I currently call a
"multimethodological approach" (cf. PUREN "From eclecticism to the complex management of
methodological variation in language-culture didactics", www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/2022g/).
10
Appendix 1. Historical evolution of approaches in foreign language teaching in France
OBJECT ORIENTATION5
(KNOW IT)
SUBJECT ORIENTATION1
(THE ACTION)
APPROACH BY...
1
GRAMMAR
2
LEXICON
3
CULTURE
4.1
4
COMMUNICATION
4.2
5
ACTION
SUPPORTS
isolated phrases
of examples
visual
(representations)
and textual
documents
(descriptions)
textual
documents
(stories)
audiovisual
documents
(dialogues)
all types of documents,
including authentic ones
documents produced
by the learners
themselves to
complete their project
ACTIVITIES
understanding,
producing
observing,
describing
analyzing,
interpreting,
comparing,
extrapolating,
transposing, reacting
reproducing,
expressing
themselves
getting informed,
inform
acting, interacting
SKILLS
CE
EO
combination6
CE-EO
combination
CO-EO
various juxtapositions6
CE, CO, EE, EO
various articulations6
CE/CO/EE/EO
METHODOLOGY
OF REFERENCE
“traditional
methodology”
“direct
methodology”
"active methodology"
"audiovisual
methodology"
"communicative
approach"
"social action-oriented
approach"
PERIODS7
1840-1900
1900-1910
1920-1960
1960-1990
1970-1990
2000-?
5
On the object/subject orientations in language didactics, cf. PUREN Ch., “Perspective objet et perspective sujet en didactique des langues-cultures”, Études de
Linguistique Appliquée, n° 109, janv.-mars 1998, pp. 9-37, www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/1998f/.
6
In combination, the different activities are carried out simultaneously (e.g. CE-EO: the learners comment orally in class on a written text that has just been put
in front of them, based on comprehension questions asked by the teacher). In juxtaposition, the activities are each carried out independently (e.g. CE, EO: the
learners, after having worked on the factual comprehension of a written document using a MCQ, are invited to react orally in class). In articulation, on the other
hand, the activities are programmed in such a way that the product of one must be taken into account in the next (e.g. CE/EO: learners give an oral account of
a written text based on the written questions they have previously worked on.
7
The periods indicated have only a symbolic value. The first three periods correspond to school education (official instructions), the last two to adult education
(Council of Europe documents: Threshold Levels of the 1970s and Common European Framework of Reference of 2001). Hence the "tilting" of the decades 1960-
1990, due to the different rates of diffusion of innovation in the two sectors. These periods do not take into account the phenomena of differentiation between
languages in school didactics. For example, the methodology of Spanish has remained until today, for the most part, the approach by culture... but it is also the
model that prevails in all languages for the terminal certification (the baccalaureate).
11
Appendix 2. Cours de langue et de civilisation françaises 1er et 2e degrés
(1953], Unité 24
MAUGER Gaston, Cours de langue et de civilisation françaises 1er et 2e degrés,
Paris, Hachette, 1984 [1e ed.1953]. Unité 24, p. 64.