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THE CURRENT ORIENTATIONS OF THE DIDACTICS OF LANGUAGES AND CULTURES
AND EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
by Christian Puren
Professor Emeritus of the University of Saint-Etienne
christian.puren@univ-st-etienne.fr
www.christianpuren.com
Abstract
This article takes up the contents of a lecture given on the occasion of a colloquium entitled
"Ethics, citizenship and educational issues in language teaching and learning" at the Université
d'Artois (France) in January 2023. I show that the Language Policy Unit of the Council of Europe,
to which the organizers of the colloquium refer in their orientation text, represents a counter-
model of democratic functioning, and that their proposals constitute a counter-model of "citizen
didactics". As the pedagogy of reference of the actional perspective, namely the project
pedagogy, requires, the problem of the formation of democratic citizenship in the language class
is concretely that of the autonomy and the responsibility of the students in the conduct of their
common learning project and in the realization of pedagogical projects, which implies the
mobilization of all the methodological matrices available. While the proposals of the Council of
Europe lead to the dissolution of language teaching in a vague "plurilingual and intercultural
education", the citizenship training of students must be conceived in a very concrete way as the
responsible management, between the teacher and the learners, of the modes and means of
effective learning of the language.
Acronyms
–CEFR[L]: Common European Framework of Reference [for Languages] (CoE 2001)
–CoE: Council of Europe
–DLC: Didactics of Languages-Cultures
–FFL: French as Foreign Language
–IPM: Integrated Plurilingual Methodology
–LPU: Language Policy Unit
Introduction
My intervention is situated in the Axis 1 of the Colloquium, “Éthique, citoyenneté et enjeux
éducatifs dans l’enseignement-apprentissage des langues” ("Ethics, citizenship and educational
issues in language teaching and learning")
1
, and it constitutes in particular a reaction to two
explicit references, in the call for papers of the organizers, to the orientations of the Council of
Europe (CoE) concerning the educational goal announced for this axis (English translation of the
French version of the document):
Learning a foreign language means acquiring the intellectual tools to face reality and the
unknown, to enrich oneself through the knowledge of other cultures and other views of
the world. Learning also means less ignorance, which is the basis of intolerance and
1
I have kept the look of the original slide show, in which the comments illustrate the documents as much
as they illustrate the text.
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racism" (Hugh STARKEY, Council of Europe). (Hugh STARKEY, Council of Europe,
Strasbourg, 2002)
"What tools do we have to educate for democratic citizenship, as recommended by the
Council of Europe, which advocates "inclusion and not exclusion, participation and not
marginalization" (European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1992)?
The COE's "Language Policy Unit" (LPU) has published a number of documents which state that
training for democratic citizenship, through "plurilingual and intercultural education", is its
"vision" for language teaching. Here are a few examples, each with a short quote:
–Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, 2001)
The Council also supports teaching and learning methods that help young and old
alike to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to become more
independent in their thinking and actions in order to be more responsible and
cooperative in their relationships with others. In this sense, this work helps to
promote democratic citizenship. (p. 4)
–Guide for the development of language education policies in Europe (2007). The origin
of the document is a "Scientific Committee" created for the preparation of the conference
"Linguistic Diversity for Democratic Citizenship in Europe (Innsbruck, May 1999)".
–School, community, university: partnerships for sustainable democracy. Education for
Democratic Citizenship in Europe and the United States (2011):
This guide examines how schools and universities can work with local communities
to promote democracy in society based on the principles of Education for
Democratic Citizenship (EDC), a concept developed by the Council of
Europe.
–Council of Europe Language Policy Portal (latest consultation 2022 12 18): "Languages
are a fundamental factor in the lives of citizens and the democratic functioning of
societies."
I underline: We can see that the CoE even claims authorship of the concept of "education for
democratic citizenship", and its acronym "EDC".
Plurilingual and intercultural education" is currently defined in this way on the CoE's "Resource
and Reference Platform for Plurilingual and Intercultural Education":
A major challenge for education systems is to give learners the opportunity to develop
their language and intercultural skills in order to enable them to act effectively as
citizens, acquire knowledge and develop attitudes open to otherness. Such a vision of
language and culture teaching constitutes plurilingual and intercultural education.
(underlined in the text, www.coe.int/fr/web/language-policy/platform, last consultation
2022 12 17)
I will defend the following ideas in my speech: from a didactic point of view, the problem of
training for democratic citizenship in the language classroom is concretely that of empowering
and making students as well as teachers responsible for the conduct of their common teaching-
learning project. As far as this training is concerned, the set of guidelines of the CoE's LPU
constitutes a perfect counter-model both in the way they are elaborated (chapter 1) and in the
proposals made (chapter 2), whereas credible alternatives already exist (chapter 3). Indeed, for
a long time, a number of language-culture didacticians have been denouncing the drifts of the
LPU, whose effects on school language teaching in Europe are catastrophic, and have been
making proposals that effectively combine the formative aims and the specific objectives of
school language-culture teaching and learning.
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1. The CoE’s Language Policy Unit: a counter-model for democratic functioning
Two critical books have been published on LPU orientations and specifically on the CEFR, Bruno
Maurer's in 2012, and the one I co-edited with him in 2019. In the general introduction to the
latter (p. 1), I announce the list of some of the many available critical articles we refer to:
Berchoud 2017; Comerford 2010; Friederike Delouis 2008; Lefranc 2009; Maurer 2011; Migeot
2017; Prieur 2017; Puren 2006d, 2007b, 2012b, 2015f; Simons, 2011.
Friederike Delouis's 2008 article (the only one whose complete references I give in the
bibliography of this article) is a synthesis of all the strong and systematic criticisms made of the
CEFR by about twenty German-speaking educationalists at a conference in Tübingen (Germany)
the year after its publication. They already feared what would actually happen next:
An economic instrumentalization of languages and their learning?
[...]
Private language schools can use the CEFR as a 'quality label' that ennobles their
products" (Thonshoff: 188). (Friederike Delouis 2008, p. 29)
The most important part of the CEFR, in fact, deals with a mode of certification assessment that
is in fact a business model, whose main purpose is to promote it. This goal was already evident
in one of the CoE's earlier major publications, the 1996 Vantage level, about which I wrote in
2001 (Puren 2001a):
There is already a real European language market which will only grow in the future, and
in its most lucrative segments (adult education and the corresponding certifications)
organizations of the same dimension have already been set up, such as Eurocentres or
ALTE (Association of Language Testers in Europe). I mention these two organizations
because on the title page of what is intended to be a sequel to the 1975 Threshold level
–van Ek & John Trim's Vantage level (Council of Europe, 1996)- they are warmly thanked
for their "important financial contribution to this work". (p. 6)
In the general conclusion of our joint book (Maurer and Puren 2019), after a proper investigation
of the development process of the CEFR and its Companion Volume, Bruno Maurer was able to
state, without fear of contradiction:
The CEFR [2001] and the CV [Companion Volume, 2018], even more so for the latter,
are indeed the work of two organizations, two private for-profit companies, the
Cambridge English Learning Assessment and the Eurocentres Foundation. The authors,
whose names appear in the acknowledgements but not on the cover, are all employees
of these organizations: the authorship could not be clearer. It is not surprising that in this
context their private employers find it profitable. It is much more surprising, however,
that on this basis, one would claim to be building public linguistic education policies. [...]
Behind this mechanism, it is the whole process of expertise that is to be questioned: the
procedure of choice of experts, the construction of the framework of their mission, the
mode of work by compilation within the framework of a carefully maintained entre-soi;
upstream, it is even the mission entrusted to the Unit of linguistic policies of the Council
of Europe that must be questioned: what mandate, what real political project? (p. 295)
In the same book, I explain why the CEFR proficiency scales propose « des descripteurs en
réalité impossibles à utiliser par les enseignants eux-mêmes » ("descriptors that are in reality
impossible to use by teachers themselves", chap. 1.3.4.4, p. 57), and that this is « une
supercherie et un stratagème » ("a deception and a stratagem") on the part of the authors (title
of chap. 1.3.4.7, p. 74):
They are in fact promoting their own certifications to teachers, and to the managers and
decision-makers of school systems, while ensuring that they are unable to compete with
them. This inability can only convince education officials, policy makers in their countries,
and ultimately the teachers themselves, that the only reasonable decision is to entrust
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these organizations with the certification of their students in parallel with the national
examinations, and probably then as a replacement for these examinations, since these
are the only certifications that can boast international recognition. (pp. 74-75).
This is what is happening in the teaching of languages in schools in France. And yet, certificate-
based evaluations have very important effects upstream. In his 2012 book, Bruno Maurer already
wrote:
The reorientation of educational systems is taking place gradually, without any debate. If
all national systems are indeed to become "plurilingual and intercultural", then let it be
at the end of clearly stated national debates where the effects in terms of the conception
of citizenship, the mutation of the place of the school, the commodification of language
teaching or the conception of the teaching profession will be weighed. Instead of this
approach, measures are gradually being introduced, in small steps, which have been
developed without political legitimacy and which are gradually distorting the systems. (p.
153)
And he accused the authors of the CEFR of « Développer le sentiment de citoyenneté pour
contrebalancer le déficit de citoyenneté » ("Developing a sense of citizenship to counterbalance
the citizenship deficit", title of chapter 3.2.2, p. 117).
To conclude this chapter, I will simply reproduce the references from a book published by the
CoE in 2015:
COSTE Daniel, CAVALLI Marisa. 2015. Éducation, mobilité, altérité. Les fonctions de
médiation de l'école. Unité des Politiques linguistiques, Division des politiques éducatives,
Service de l’éducation, Direction de la citoyenneté démocratique et de la
participation, DGII : Direction générale de la démocratie, Conseil de l’Europe, 2015,
72 p.
I emphasize: the authors of this study are not responsible for it, but the titles of the CoE’s
services responsible for their publication are particularly unfortunate, suggesting more the
decisions of an authoritarian bureaucracy than the formation of democratic and participatory
citizenship...
2. The CEFR: a counter-model of "citizen didactics”
I will define "citizen didactics" here as all the implementations of the teaching-learning process
by the teacher and the learners leading their common project as autonomous and responsible
citizens.
In Friederike Delouis's 2008 synthesis, two passages are already included which note the
criticism of German-speaking educationalists on this point at their 2002 conference, the first
concerning learners, the second teachers:
One of the researchers regrets that the CEFR deals too little with the learner as an
individual; the difficulty of a linguistic performance is seen as inherent to the task, without
any link to the abilities of the individual who produces it (Abel: 11). Intellectual
differences between students are not taken into account as preconditions for learning. In
particular, levels B2 and especially C could not be reached by many learners and even by
native speakers, Barkowski believes. Too often, the student is perceived only in his
cognitive dimension, on the model of a computer that assimilates and reproduces data.
Moreover, the Framework contains nothing about "learner languages" or
"interlanguages", nor about learning strategies or hypotheses tested by the learner. (p.
26) [...]
Possible drifts
[...] It would be fatal if the CEFR prevented initiatives and hindered the teachers' freedom,
Abel remarks. The descriptors, it is thought, will necessarily have multiple effects on
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learning and teaching; can we avoid the danger of a situation where programs and
textbooks will be dominated by a concern for level and the descriptors associated with
them? (p. 29)
One can only note the relevance of these criticisms, and the fact that this drift has indeed
occurred, just as much as the one, noted above, of "the economic instrumentalization of
languages and their learning". This was not, strictly speaking, a "danger"¸ but a logic inscribed
in the document itself: the only real only real concern of the authors, in fact, is to promote their
model of certification assessment. However, in this type of assessment, by its nature and
function, one is only concerned with the results, the products of teaching-learning, without
taking into account the teaching-learning process in which the learners and teachers have
previously been involved with their cultures, their experiences, their personalities, or again, as
it is said at the end of the first quotation above, with their own languages and their own learning
strategies.
In the following passage, the authors of the CEFR seem to appeal to the democratic participation
of teachers:
If there are practitioners who upon reflection are convinced that the objectives
appropriate to the learners towards whom they have responsibilities are most effectively
pursued by methods other than those advocated elsewhere by the Council of Europe,
then we should like them to say so, to tell us and others of the methods they use and the
objectives they pursue. This might lead to a wider understanding of the complex diversity
of the world of language education, or to lively debate, which is always preferable to
simple acceptance of a current orthodoxy merely because it is an orthodoxy. (pp. 142-
143)
The invitation " If there are practitioners who upon reflection are convinced that..." clearly
betrays the dominant, and somewhat condescending, posture of the authors in relation to
teachers
2
. And what sincerity can be accorded to their invitation, when their text is published in
French by Didier editions in a volume whose back cover begins with the following lines?:
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is the result of more than
ten years of research by leading linguists in the 41 member states of the Council of
Europe. The projects that preceded this final result were subject to wide consultation and
resulted in this very important contribution to applied linguistics and modern language
teaching.
What these lines invite is not a debate, but a pure and simple application of the orientations
of this text by the teachers.
Applicationism is a means constantly used throughout the history of didactics of languages-
cultures (DLC) to deprive teachers of their professional autonomy and responsibility.
Applicationism is also a reductionism, which does not allow teachers to really take into account
the complexity that they are constantly confronted with in their classrooms. With the frustration,
even the bad conscience of teachers, applicationism finally feeds institutional authoritarianism:
recommending one practice more or less strongly always implies discarding at least one other.
The following different forms of reductionism can be identified in the history of DLC, often
working in combination with each other:
–methodological reductionism, successively generated in the course of history by each of
the constituted methodologies, which were all intended to be exclusive;
2
The French translation accentuates this posture: « Si certains praticiens, après réflexion, restent
convaincus que... » (“If some practitioners, after reflection, remain convinced that...”).
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–scientific reductionism, of the linguistic type, in the so-called "Applied Linguistics", or
cognitive, with today's promoters of a teaching based on the "discoveries" of
neuroscience;
–technological reductionism, based on a supposed technological determinism;
–practical reductionism, based on a set of practices considered as "the best practices".
The more power one wants to take over teachers, the more applicationisms one summons at
the same time. To experience this here, I invent an ad hoc statement that brings them all
together:
The approach we propose in this course brings together all the good practices whose
effectiveness, demonstrated in the field by the experience of many teachers, is based on
the fact that they bring together and synergize all the potentialities of the new
technologies so as to make the different language processing areas in the brain work.
Can one imagine a more "convincing" argument, or at least one that leaves less room for a
debate in which teachers could put forward their own professional experience?
The authors of the CEFR cannot claim any of these applicationisms: they repeatedly state that
they do not want to impose any methodology or good practice whatsoever, and their allusions
are rare and vague to what they call, on page 4, "exploiting the full potential of new
communication and information technologies". As for scientific applicationism, here is what they
write in different passages of their text:
Recent work on linguistic universals has not as yet produced results which can be used
directly to facilitate language learning, teaching and assessment. (p. 109)
The grammar of any language in this sense is highly complex and so far defies
definitive or exhaustive treatment. (p. 113)
6.2.2 How do learners learn?
6.2.2.1 There is at present no sufficiently strong research-based consensus on
how learners learn for the Framework to base itself on any one learning theory.
Some theorists believe that [... Others believe that [...] Between these polar
extremes, most ‘mainstream’ learners, teachers and their support
services will follow more eclectic practices [...] (pp. 139-140)
I emphasize: as we can see, the authors of the CECRL only admit the eclecticism of teachers
insofar as they consider that research is unfortunately not yet sufficiently advanced to impose
on them the single method, which would be the "scientific" method
3
.
But these authors are inaugurating a new form of applicationism that is more pernicious than
the previous ones, and that can be called "ideological" in reference to the title of Bruno Maurer's
2012 book, Enseignement des langues et construction européenne. Le plurilinguisme, nouvelle
idéologie dominante (Language teaching and European construction. Plurilingualism, the new
dominant ideology)
4
. The following passage from the 2007 Guide for the Development of
Language Policies in Europe is a perfect illustration:
3
In the French version of the CEFR, the translator has added an occurrence of the same meaning: “The
description [of competencies levels] also needs to be based on theories of language competence. This is
difficult to achieve because the available theory and research is inadequate to provide a basis for such a
description” (p. 21) has been translated as: Il faut aussi que la description [des niveaux de compétence]
se fonde sur des théories relatives à la compétence langagière bien que la théorie et la recherche
actuellement disponibles soient inadéquates pour fournir une base. (p. 23)
4
One might as well speak, as Emmanuel Antier does in a 2018 article (§26), of "political applicationism".
For an available online rehash of the main ideas that B. Maurer outlines in his 2012 book, cf. Maurer 2015.
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The aim of plurilingualism and plurilingual education is not simultaneously teaching a
range of languages, teaching through comparing different languages or teaching as many
languages as possible. Rather, the goal is to develop plurilingual competence and
intercultural education, as a way of living together.
5
. (p. 18)
In the title of one of the chapters of his 2012 book, Bruno Maurer announces that he is going to
develop a criticism that seems to me to be very accurate: “Quand l’Europe dissout
l’enseignement des langues dans l’éducation plurilingue et interculturelle” ("When Europe
dissolves language teaching in plurilingual and intercultural education") (chapter 1.2. p. 17). He
takes it up again in the conclusion of his book in the form of questions of interpellation:
Can we admit without debate that the more we affirm the central role of languages, the
less we actually teach them? Therefore, is it acceptable to focus all research on
intercultural competencies, the "savoir-être" (“know-how to be”), to the detriment of
linguistic competencies, the "savoirs" (“knowledge”), and communicative competencies,
the "savoir-faire" (“know-how to do”)? (p. 152)
It is not only the whole of DLC research, but the whole of teaching that suffers from this shift in
focus. Language teachers are first and foremost specialists in the teaching and learning of
language: to take away this objective by giving them only an educational purpose is simply to
deprive them of what their professional autonomy and responsibility are based on.
In a 2006 article entitled "Le CECR et la réflexion méthodologique en didactique des langues-
cultures : un chantier à reprendre" (The CEFR and methodological reflection in language and
culture didactics: a project to be resumed), I justified my criticism of the abandonment of the
methodological question by the authors of the CEFR:
In contrast to the aims, objectives and contents, which are largely the prerogative of the
institutions, methodological issues are indeed the core of the language teacher's job.
(p. 6)
But long before me, in 1985, the Swiss didactician René Richterich had stressed the importance
of language teaching-learning methodology as a common area for the implementation of
autonomy and responsibility of both teachers and learners:
Learning to learn a foreign language, helping the learner to discover his own learning
strategies, making him capable of developing and exploiting them, teaching him to
become autonomous, these are some of the salient features of current pedagogy and
didactics. It is interesting to note that the methodological burden is twofold: on the one
hand it concerns the teacher who must find practical means to carry out the above tasks,
on the other hand it concerns the learner who must acquire a method to learn.
Methodology therefore applies to both teaching and learning. (p. 13)
This centrality of methodological questions is found in the modeling of the field of didactics that
I have been proposing for a long time in my work:
5
I will come back to this reduction of the social problem to "living together" later.
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The didactic perspective consists in constantly questioning the methodological questions
themselves (in other words, in problematizing them) on the basis of all the extra-methodological
positions represented on this diagram, without giving priority to any of them in the answers,
which would inevitably lead to reductionism. Methodological applicationism appears when the
methodology used is no longer questioned, because it is claimed to be consistent. Scientific
applicationism is based on one or more "MODELS" (theoretical models); technological
applicationism is based on "MATERIALS"; and good practice applicationism is based on
"PRACTICES". Another form of reductionism, starting from the ENVIRONMENTS, was
systematically carried out by all methodologies when they were first developed: they were
always built at the outset, in fact, with reference to a specific audience and the beginnings of
learning (cf. Puren 1998c).
In the ideological applicationism of the CoE's LPU, this entire field of didactic reflection and design
is neutralized in favor of an element of a "meta-didactic" nature ("didactological", in the
terminology I use), in this case a purpose.
The aims have all legitimacy to intervene in the didactic field: as an ethical positioning, they
even constitute, with the ideological and epistemological positioning, the three main elements
of the didactological perspective. But this perspective has to be constantly recursive with the
two other constitutive perspectives of the discipline, i.e. the methodological and the didactical
ones, in order not to lose sight of the complexity of the discipline (cf. e.g. Puren 1994a for a
historical approach, 1999a for the current functioning).
The two other meta-methodological positions in the field of didactics have also led to reductionist
drifts in DLC:
–EVALUATION: this is the case when teaching is heavily influenced by language tests, or
is reduced to test preparation (Teaching to the test).
–OBJECTIVES-BASED: this is the case when teaching is strongly influenced by
predetermined language content, as in the so-called "language on specific objectives"
courses which are based on "prior analysis of language needs": for example, FOS
(Français sur objectifs spécifiques, “French on specific objectives”) and FOU (Français sur
objectifs universitaires, “French on university objectives”) courses. A version of this
reductionist approach is well known in general pedagogy, which was rife in the 1980s,
and which is precisely called "objective-based pedagogy". Coupled with notional-
functional grammar, it has led in some countries to language programs consisting solely
of lists of language notions and functions.
The CEFR corresponds to a strong version of reductionism, since the authors propose to combine
the two above-mentioned reductionisms in an assessment by predefined competence objectives.
They thus deprive teachers of a decisive area of their shared responsibility with students, that
of joint regulation of the teaching-learning process.
This CEFR is a very rich document: each time I reread it, I discover another good reason to
criticize it, and to be surprised that so few didacticians do so. Here is what it says on page 20 of
the French version:
Learning efforts in relation to those objectives and those units need also to be situated
on this vertical dimension of progress, i.e. assessed in relation to gains in proficiency.
(CoE 2001, CEFR p. 16)
One would understand "results of efforts" at a stretch, although this is certainly not the best way
to encourage learners' efforts. But to think that proficiency scales assess the learnings efforts
themselves is a pure logical and pedagogical aberration.
In particular, the authors of the CEFR make an extreme reduction of the great complexity of the
problem of evaluation in schools, as I was able to describe it in a 2001 article entitled “La
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problématique de l’évaluation en didactique scolaire des langues“ ("The problem of evaluation
in school language didactics", Puren 2001b), and as I was able to propose its management in
the book Maurer and Puren 2019, in the 4th part entitled “Pour une autre évaluation, l’évaluation
intégrée » ("For another evaluation, the integrated evaluation"). This reduction of the
problematic of evaluation in the CEFR inevitably causes a reduction of the didactic problematic
as a whole, since the evaluation model they propose is a certificative evaluation conceived
independently of any teaching-learning process.
3. Available alternatives to the CEFR authors' "vision" of language and culture
teaching
I will successively take up the two elements of the "vision" of language teaching proposed by
the CoE LPU experts, "plurilingual and intercultural education" and "education for democratic
citizenship".
3.1. Plurilingual and intercultural education
–As far as "plurilingual education" is concerned, I refer to the entire 5th part of the 2019 joint
book, written by Bruno Maurer, which is significantly entitled “Vers une méthodologie
plurilingue intégrée” ("Towards an integrated plurilingual methodology") (my emphasis). He
opposes the conception of the CoE's LPU, according to which "plurilingual education is not about
the simultaneous teaching of several languages" (cf. above the lines taken from the 2007 Guide
for the development of language education policies in Europe):
The proposal for an "integrated plurilingual methodology" (IPM) that we make in the
following lines really takes into account at least two languages in the way of teaching and
in the reflection on how to learn and teach them. (p. 238)
B. Maurer presents this IPM only in terms of its general principles and a few concrete examples,
because –and this is the consequence that interests me directly here– its implementation can
only be contextual and diversified, in particular since it will depend on the nature of the L1 and
its functioning in relation to the L2, and it can only be conceived and implemented under the
responsibility of local educationalists and field teachers:
In contrast to the CEFR, which unduly claims that a single framework for the
undifferentiated teaching of all languages is possible, we set out the limits of relevance
and implementation of the IPM according to the audiences concerned, the teaching
objectives, the didactic traditions and the teaching-learning environments. These limits
lead to a "plurimethodological" approach that can, by means of a reasoned eclecticism,
respond to the coherent complex management of the teaching-learning processes of
different languages, starting from an agreement on broad common principles based on
shared knowledge about how languages are learned. (p. 287)
–As far as "intercultural education" is concerned, I refer to my "Complex model of cultural
competence: trans-, meta-, inter-, pluri- and co-cultural components" (Puren 2011j), and to the
use I have made of it since then in various publications (cf. on my website the bibliographic
section "Culture – Cultural Competence"
6
): it is all these components of cultural competence
that must henceforth be taken into account in the didactics of language-cultures. The authors of
the 2001 CEFR had logically added to the intercultural competence of the communicative
approach the "pluricultural competence", to take into account the new "plurilingual and
pluricultural Europe" (p. 3). However, they had not drawn the consequence of their new objective
of training a "social actor" in a foreign language-culture, namely a "co-cultural" competence in
the sense of being able to adopt or create with the other, in order to act with him, a set of shared
conceptions of common action.
6
www.christianpuren.com/bibliographies/culture-compétence-culturelle/.
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In the course of 2005, the experts of the CoE's LPU even reduced the cultural issue to
"intercultural" again, as can be seen in the name of their project "plurilingual and intercultural
education".
3.2. Education for democratic citizenship
The experts of the CoE's LPU therefore still do not take into account in their educational project
not only the "doing together" of collective work, but even the "doing society together" which is
so essential in a shared citizenship. We saw above, in the quotation from the 2007 Guide for the
Development of Language Policies in Europe, that the object of plurilingual education was
reduced for them to "living together" (p. 18).
The same theme of "living together", with its specific values, can be found in the following
programmatic question posed by the authors of the orientation text of the present Arras
conference:
How should the educational system of a country, or a region, adjust to meet the needs
of learners and promote language teaching that ensures the formation of citizens who
respect human rights, fundamental freedoms, and who also observe values such as
tolerance, equality, respect and living together? (emphasis added).
Yet more and more philosophers, sociologists and pedagogues consider this "living together"
insufficient to collectively meet the challenges posed by today's societies and the school project
of citizenship education. In a dossier yet entitled "Living Together" in the January 2018 issue of
the magazine Le Courrier de l'Atlas, the political scientist and sociologist Vincent Geisser, a
research fellow at the CNRS and IREMAM (Institute for Research and Studies on the Arab and
Muslim World) denounces:
[Living together] is an intellectual, political and societal posture that advocates tolerance,
anti-racism and anti-discrimination. But the formula has become a catch-all. [...] The
discourse of living together serves more and more our incapacity to act together. [...]
Personally, the notion of "in common" seems more relevant to me, [that is] the defense
of common values and "doing things together" (p. 28)
The criticism of this reduction to "living together" in the French school system is just as firm
from the pedagogue Philippe Meirieu, who declared in 2012 on the Café pédagogique site:
In this situation of disintegration of the collective, the injunction to train for "citizenship"
and "living together" is not very effective... because "living together" is only an illusion
or a fusional regression as long as it is not articulated –as the whole tradition of popular
education has shown and repeate– on a "doing together".
The French conception of society is very demanding, because it considers citizens as autonomous
and responsible individuals who "make society" with all the others, i.e. who participate actively
with them in the same project of society. The great novelty of the actional perspective in
language didactics is that its reference pedagogy is a well-known pedagogy, the project
pedagogy, which gives itself precisely as a first goal the formation of a citizen, with as a
fundamental principle the idea that the best way to form students to citizenship is to ask them
to act in their class micro-society as real citizens engaged with their teacher in a common
project: in this case, for our purposes, in a project of teaching-learning a language-culture. In
the actional perspective, contrary to the conception of the CoE's LPU experts, citizenship
education is therefore inseparable from a "doing together", and this "doing together" can only
be the effective teaching-learning of a language culture.
It is undoubtedly the influence of the Anglo-Saxons in the drafting of the first (English) version
of the CEFR, which explains in part the absence of consideration of "making society together" in
this text, which nevertheless introduces into the teaching-learning of languages the goal of
training a "social actor". In fact, the “faire ensemble” ("making together") does not have the
same place in Anglo-Saxon political philosophy as it does in French political philosophy: the ideal
Christian PUREN, “The current orientations of the didactics of languages and cultures and
education for democratic citizenship”
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of multicultural societies is limited to the harmonious coexistence of diverse communities (to
“living together”). This difference can be found in the two languages themselves: the title of the
issue of the Cahiers de recherche du GIRSEF
7
, No. 110, September 2017, "Faire société" dans
un monde incertain. Quel rôle pour l'école ?" was thus translated in the English version (No. 111
of the ournal, same date) as "Living together in an uncertain world. What role for the school?"
(my emphasis).
The actional perspective, which is a perspective of social action, given its natural reference
pedagogy, project pedagogy, considers the classroom as a micro-society in its own right. In the
case of the teaching-learning of a foreign language-culture, the homology is perfect, since the
challenge is to train a social actor acting in a foreign language-culture in a multilingual and
multicultural society, and that precisely the classroom is a multilingual environment (one must
manage at least L1 and L2) and multicultural: there is at least the teaching culture and the
multiple learning cultures produced by the personalities, cognitive profiles, motivations,
experiences and individual learning strategies. As I have noted repeatedly in my work, and again
in a recent essay on mediation (Puren 2019b):
by exploiting the homology between the classroom micro-society and the outside society,
one can consider and make the language classroom function as a "co-cultural incubator",
i.e. of social action culture, i.e. a place and a time where students, in an intensive and
secure manner because mediated by the teacher, have the opportunity to train
themselves in skills that will be necessary later on in their professional and civic lives:
adapting to other ways of working, working in groups, facing the unknown, uncertainty
and complexity, learning from one's own mistakes and the mistakes of others, producing
by making the most of limited means, conceiving and conducting collective projects, self-
evaluation individually and collectively, etc. The language-culture teacher can then fully
claim a role as an educator in school teaching, and as a trainer in vocational teaching
(p. 59)
Pedagogical projects, because they are social actions, and therefore complex, are likely to
mobilize all available methodological matrices (cf. Puren 073-en), in other words to require what
can be called a "plurimethodological approach" (cf. Puren 2020f, 2022g). In a working paper
(Puren 053), I have proposed a practical exercise and its answer key that deals with a project
presented by a teacher of French as Foreign Language (FFL) during the 12th SEDIFRALE (Rio de
Janeiro, June 2001). This project had a marked civic dimension, since it consisted, for students
of a final year class in FFL in the city center of a South American capital, to go and read their
translations in Spanish of French poems in classes in the "underprivileged" suburbs of the capital.
The proposed exercise consists of pointing out, for each of the six different types of activity that
these students will have to carry out, the methodological matrices that they will have to
implement. The exercise can be done, or the proposed answer key can be consulted directly,
which shows that all the methodological matrices had to be mobilized successively during the
realization of this project, some, sometimes, in combination with others.
Conclusion
I will conclude by relying, as I did in my lecture, on two charts. The national educational project
is declined by the Ministry of National Education (France) in the Socle commun de connaissances,
de compétences et de culture (Bulletin Officiel No. 17 of April 23, 2015), in the form of a series
of objectives, all of which are presented as "a central reference for the work of all teachers and
actors in the educational system" (p. 44). If we take up these objectives one by one and compare
them with the different didactic configurations currently available in DLC, we immediately notice
the existence of strong binary correspondences
8
:
7
Journal of the GIRSEF, Groupe interdisciplinaire de recherche sur la socialisation, l'éducation et la
formation of the Catholic University of Leuven, https://uclouvain.be/fr/chercher/girsef/les-cahiers-du-
girsef.html
8
First published in Puren 2019b, chap. 3.1.1. "Educational mediation," pp. 44-45.
Christian PUREN, “The current orientations of the didactics of languages and cultures and
education for democratic citizenship”
www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux:2023c-en Page 12 on 14
The "common base of knowledge,
competencies and culture" ...
Corresponding configuration in DLC
- "...opens to knowledge, forms judgment and
critical thinking, from ordered elements of rational
knowledge of the world."
active methodology
- "...fosters a development of the person in
interaction with the world around them."
communicative-intercultural approach
- "...provides a general education that is open and
common to all and based on values that allow for
living in a tolerant society of freedom."
multilingual and multicultural methodologies
- "...provides students with the means to engage
in school activities, to act, to interact with others,
to gain autonomy and thus gradually exercise their
freedom and status as responsible citizens."
social action-oriented approach
(and its project-based pedagogy)
Furthermore, the different components of cultural competence favored in each of these
methodological matrices can be taken up again with regard to teaching-learning cultures. They
allow us to model in this way (see table below) what can be called "the components of the
competence of complex management of methodological variation by the teacher and the
learners"
9
:
Components of the cultural competence of complex management
of methodological variation by teachers and learners
COMPONENTS
1. Knowledge of the different didactic cultures (with the corresponding
methodologies), starting with that of his/her learners.
metacultural
2. Ability to distance oneself from one's own methodology, or that of one's initial
training, or that of one's textbook. Interest in and respect for other
methodologies (especially those of his/her learners).
intercultural
3. Ability to build different methodological devices in variation (to all learners,
successively) or in differentiation (to different learners or groups of learners).
multicultural
4. Ability to build methodological systems that combine different methodologies
in a coherent manner so as to produce synergistic effects between them.
pluricultural
5. Ability to build a common teaching-learning culture with learners.
co-cultural
6. Ability to apply the principles currently recognized in school pedagogy:
homology between the social action targeted and the school action favored,
active pedagogy, explicit teaching, reflective learning, empowerment, and
responsibility of learners.
transcultural
Given the level of autonomy required of students in project-based pedagogy, this multi-
methodological management can only be achieved in the framework of a permanent dialogue
between them and their teacher. In order to ensure the training of democratic citizenship in the
classroom, as the CoE wishes, language teaching must not be "dissolved" (to use the expression
of B. Maurer quoted above) in plurilingual and intercultural education: on the contrary, it is at
the heart of didactic reflection and intervention, in the management and joint implementation of
the various possible methodological choices, that the training of pupils in autonomy and civic
responsibility can best be achieved in concrete terms.
9
First published in Puren 2022g, final slide #49.
Christian PUREN, “The current orientations of the didactics of languages and cultures and
education for democratic citizenship”
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