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English version of « Éloge de l’artificiel en didactique scolaire des langues-cultures », published
in EDL, Études de Didactique des Langues no. 40-June 2023, "L'authenticité", pp. 49-62
(https://www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/2024e/).
PRAISE FOR THE ARTIFICIAL IN SCHOOL DIDACTICS OF LANGUAGES-CULTURES
ÉLOGE DE L’ARTIFICIEL EN DIDACTIQUE DES LANGUES-CULTURES
by Christian Puren
Professor Emeritus of the University of Saint-Etienne (France)
wwwchristianpuren.com/
contact@christianpuren.com
Table of contents
Abstract ....................................................................................................................... 2
Résumé ........................................................................................................................ 2
Introduction .................................................................................................................. 3
1. The "natural", the "artificial" and the "scholastic" ........................................................... 4
2. Authentic documents .................................................................................................. 7
2.1. Authentic" literary texts versus non-literary texts ..................................................... 7
2.2. Authentic documents" versus fabricated documents ................................................. 8
3. Authentic communication situations ............................................................................. 9
4. Authenticity and social action-oriented approach ......................................................... 10
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 12
Bibliographic references ............................................................................................... 13
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Abstract
This article proposes a journey through the history of methodologies in school didactics of
languages-cultures, which shows that authenticity has not always been opposed to artificiality,
but that for a long time these two notions have been considered as both opposed and
complementary. The authenticity valued over the criticized artificiality was then successively
attributed to different objects: then, to literary documents only at the expense of non-literary
documents; to social documents at the expense of documents manufactured for the needs of
teaching-learning; finally, to real or simulated communication situations in society at the
expense of learning situations in class. With the latest methodological evolution – the social
action-oriented approach and its reference pedagogy, project-based pedagogy – the opposition
loses much of its relevance with regard to documents and situations. As for language exercises,
they have always been and still are "artificial", but this artificiality must be claimed and valued:
the core of the teacher's job is indeed pedagogical engineering, that is to say precisely the design
of artificial teaching-learning devices. Against the opinion of some didacticians, and in agreement
with the empirical observation of many teachers, this article, as its title announces, makes the
praise of the artificial in school didactics of languages-cultures.
Keywords: authentic, natural, artificial, scholastic, situation, communication, learning, use,
social action-oriented approach, project-based pedagogy.
Résumé
Cet article propose un parcours dans l’histoire des méthodologies en didactique scolaire des
langues-cultures, qui montre que l’authenticité n'a pas toujours été opposée à l'artificialité, mais
qu’au contraire pendant longtemps ces deux notions ont été considérées comme à la fois
opposées et complémentaires. L'authenticité valorisée par rapport à l'artificialité critiquée a été
ensuite attribuée successivement à des objets différents : aux seuls documents littéraires aux
dépens des documents non littéraires ; aux documents sociaux aux dépens des documents
fabriqués pour les besoins de l'enseignement-apprentissage ; enfin aux situations de
communication réelles ou simulées en société aux dépens des situations d'apprentissage en
classe. Avec la dernière évolution méthodologique – la perspective actionnelle et sa pédagogie
de référence, la pédagogie de projet –, l'opposition perd en grande partie de sa pertinence en
ce qui concerne les documents et les situations. Les exercices de langue, quant à eux, ont
toujours été et restent encore « artificiels », mais cette artificialité doit être revendiquée et
valorisée : le cœur du métier de l'enseignant relève en effet de l'ingénierie pédagogique, c'est-
à-dire précisément de la conception de dispositifs artificiels d'enseignement-apprentissage.
Contre l'opinion de certains didacticiens, et en accord avec le constat empirique de beaucoup
d'enseignants, cet article, comme l'annonce son titre, fait l’éloge de l'artificiel en didactique
scolaire des langues-cultures.
Mots clés : authentique, naturel, artificiel, scolaire, situation, communication, apprentissage,
usage, perspective actionnelle, pédagogie de projet.
Acronyms
ACOT: Active, Culturally-Oriented Textbooks
APOT: Active, Practically-Oriented Textbooks
CEFRL / CECRL Common European Framework of Reference for Languages / Cadre Européen
Commun de Référence pour les Langues (2001)
DLC: Didactics of Languages-Cultures
FFL: French as a Foreign Language
AM: Active Methodology
AVM: Audiovisual Methodology
CA: Communicative Approach
SAOA: Social Action-Oriented Approach
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“Chassez l’artificiel, il revient au galop.”
(“Drive out the artificial, it comes back at a gallop.”)
Introduction
During all the decades of the dominant communicative approach in didactics of languages-
cultures (DLC), its promoters have celebrated the virtues of authenticity, which – unique thinking
obliges – has led them to appropriate the artificial. But all teachers know from experience that
exercises
1
on certain language facts at certain times are necessary for the majority of learners,
and that, for example, a metalinguistic approach can be just as indispensable as the meta-
cultural approach, which, paradoxically, has never been questioned
2
. Already empirically
validated, this double requirement of practicing language and practicing on language does not
pose any problem for complex thinking, one of whose characteristics is to integrate into its
system the idea that opposites can at the same time be complementary. I intend to show in this
article that this is the case of the authentic and the artificial in didactics of languages-cultures,
and that one can even consider, with the latest methodological evolution – the social action-
oriented approach (SAOA) and its reference pedagogy, the project-based pedagogy – that this
opposition has largely lost its relevance.
The notion of "authenticity" is necessarily given different definitions depending on the
perspective from which it is approached, as is the case with all notions concerning a complex
object - and this is the language-culture object! All perspectives, however, appeal to the two
notions of "reality" and "representativeness (of this reality)". Below are some of these definitions
for the most important element of didactic devices, since it is supposed to provide learners with
access to this reality, namely the "document". Here are some possible definitions of an "authentic
document", according to some perspectives that can be mobilized for this purpose:
–linguistic definition: document representative of the reality of the language;
–pragmatic definition: a document that is representative of the actual uses of language
for communication and action;
–sociolinguistic definition: a document that represents the actual socially situated ways
of using language;
–socio-cultural definition: document representative of the real culture of the
corresponding society.
The evaluation of the documents produced by the students is based on a judgment of
authenticity that can call upon the same perspectives. We know that the authors of the 2001
1
The term "exercises" will refer here to the different types of activities targeted at certain language facts
(of grammar, lexicon or phonology). They are all mobilized in the long "standard exercise procedure" in
school didactics of languages-cultures, which organizes a highly guided and progressive path from the
initial presentation of a new form to the final objective of its spontaneous reuse: reproduction,
location/recognition, conceptualization, application, training, directed reuse, free reuse (cf. Puren 2016).
2
Even if other simultaneous approaches had to be devised to work on the various components of a
competence as complex as cultural competence (cf. Puren 2011a).
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CEFRL, for example, propose to assess "language communication competence" based on
linguistic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic criteria (see pp. 17-18).
To arrive at an exact description of this "reality" is the primary objective of all disciplines that
claim to be "scientific". I will gladly leave them with the formidable question of the relationship
between their descriptions and the reality itself. DLC, on the other hand, is an intervention
discipline: it does not seek to describe the reality of the learning object, but to act on the learning
of this object. This type of project, which is therefore process-oriented and not product-oriented,
has numerous and profound consequences for the discipline - indeed, they determine its entire
epistemology
3
. But the consequence that interests us directly here is the following: from a
strictly didactic point of view, an "authentic" document is simply a document that a teacher
considers and uses as representative of the language and/or cultural contents that he or she
wants to present, work on and have his or her learners acquire. Criticisms concerning the "real"
linguistic and cultural authenticity of the contents of this document do not come from the DLC
discipline, but from linguistics, sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, history, etc.
This is even the case for "internal" criticisms, i.e. made according to didactic criteria. Exercises
proposed by a teacher and judged bad and ineffective by a didactician do not remain less
authentically didactic exercises, just as novels criticized by literary critics do not remain less
novels: it is precisely as didactic exercises and as novels that they are criticized. Otherwise, the
notion of "authenticity" is unduly supplemented by that of "quality", whether of nature or of use.
A poem used in a textbook solely to enable learners to identify variations in a grammatical
structure and then to infer a rule of use (I have in mind an FFL textbook) remains an authentic
poem, and it is used for authentically didactic exercises - in this case an exercise in grammatical
identification/recognition and an exercise in grammatical conceptualization (cf. supra note 1). In
short, I personally have always considered byzantine discussions about whether, to what extent,
and under what conditions an "authentic" document remains authentic when used in the
classroom to be of no practical interest to teachers.
I have taken here the example of the school didactics of languages-cultures, because it is the
one I know best, but also because it is the one that allows us to make a complete journey in the
history of DLC since the end of the XIXe century, a journey that shows why the question of the
opposition between authenticity and artificiality appeared at a certain moment and how it was
then constantly posed, even if it was on different objects and under different forms. I leave it to
the readers of the journal EDL to judge for themselves, but I think that this pathway allows us
to approach this question as it is currently posed with tools, hindsight, and a comparative
approach that can be useful to teachers in the LANSAD sector.
1. The "natural", the "artificial" and the "scholastic"
At the end of the XIXe century, the school teaching of Latin did not have the objective of
preparing for a use of Latin after the studies: this teaching had, to say it with the current
concepts, neither social objective of reference, nor social situation of reference, as we can see
in this passage of an article of 1892 of Victor Basch:
Secondary education must propose only to give a strong general, literary, philosophical
and scientific education, must propose an intellectual and moral culture, must be free from
any professional aim. [...] Classical education, I would willingly say, must not aim at
anything, but make one fit for everything.
3
They indeed determine the epistemology of DLC: cf. e.g. my 2015 essay (in French) or my article 2022b
(in English).
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I now ask why this theory, which is undisputed for all the subjects taught in our high
schools, should not apply to modern languages, why modern languages alone should be
learned, not as a means of general culture, but as a practical instrument, as a professional
study making the person who has mastered them capable of traveling conveniently to
Germany or England, of being able to do German or English correspondence, etc. (1892,
p. 388)
What Victor Basch criticizes is the fact that, since the beginning of the 1860s, the school
institution has set the teaching of modern languages as an objective not of school culture, but
of extracurricular practice. As the author of a 1901 instruction clearly wrote a few years later -
but the break had taken place forty years earlier:
The practical knowledge of modern languages has become a necessity for the
businessman and the industrialist as well as for the scholar and the literate. In high school
and college, modern languages should not be taught like dead languages. They should
not be made an instrument of literary culture or intellectual gymnastics.
At the time of the traditional methodology of teaching dead languages (Latin and classical
Greek), these languages were no longer used in society, the school learning situation was the
only situation of intended use: the distinction between "natural" learning in society and "artificial"
learning in the classroom was therefore meaningless.
As soon as the reference in terms of use becomes society, the same reference is imposed in
terms of learning, by mechanical application of a constant principle in pedagogy, that of
maximum ends-means homology
4
. This is why we see this reference to "natural" learning in
society appear in the first official instruction that breaks with traditional methodology, that of
1863:
The method to be followed is what I will call the natural method, the one used for the
child in the family, the one everyone uses in a foreign country: little grammar, English
itself has almost none
5
, but many spoken exercises, because pronunciation is the
greatest difficulty of living languages; many exercises written on the blackboard; texts
carefully prepared, well explained, and which, learned afterwards by the pupils, will
provide them with the necessary words so that they can compose other sentences
themselves in the next lesson.
Instruction on the teaching of modern languages and conferences
in the imperial high schools, September 29, 1863.
The criticism of the school environment as an artificial language teaching-learning environment
appears logically in the history of DLC from the moment when it is the social environment that
is considered as the natural environment of learning and use. For example, here is what a
German teacher wrote in 1891:
4
This same principle was applied in CA –the preferred means of teaching learners to communicate in
society is to have them communicate with each other in class– and it is now applied in the actional
perspective (AP) - the preferred means of teaching learners to act socially in a cultural language is to have
them act socially with each other in class. The project-based pedagogy is then naturally imposed: the
project is indeed currently the universal model of social action, to the point that Jean-Pierre Boutinet was
able to title his 1990 book Anthropologie du projet.
5
Anglicist colleagues will appreciate this, especially those who defend the importance, in school teaching,
of a "conceptualizing approach" to language... For more details on the "natural method", I refer to the
chapter I devoted to it in my 1988 History of Methodologies, chap. 2.1.8, pp. 74-76.
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The safest and fastest way to study a foreign language has always been to go to the
country where it is spoken.
...] What happens instead in a classroom? During the whole
course of study, nothing responds to an irresistible need of the moment, and the few
realities that can be introduced there to express the meager relations between students
and teacher cease to be represented in the life of the made man. The very need to express
oneself in the language taught exists only to the very limited extent of the teacher's
possible demands, the children's memory is almost never solicited except in the
unstimulating form of lessons to be recited in turn, direct and personal questions become
all the rarer the more numerous the pupils assembled. In short, the environment is
artificial, the system is artificial, and the final result of the studies suffers (Steph.
Alceste 1891, p. 99 and p. 101, my emphasis).
It can be seen that the "natural method" as presented in the instruction of 1863 quoted above
does not exclude school exercises. One even finds there already, implicitly or explicitly, the three
methods
6
combined which will form the hard core of the future direct school methodology of the
years 1900-1910, then of the official active methodology (AM) of the years 1920 to the 1960s
in French school education: the direct method (the mother teaches her child L1 by speaking to
him in L1; in their country, foreigners address visitors in their visitors' L2, who respond to them
in L2 as well), the oral method ("lots of spoken exercises"), and the active method (students
should be able to "compose other sentences themselves in the next lesson").
From the beginning of the 1880s, many teachers positioned themselves in this way not in relation
to the natural and the artificial, but in relation to the natural and the scholastic, and by
considering them as perfectly complementary. I will be forgiven for this long quotation from
Maurice Girard, because in it he already describes very accurately the methodological eclecticism
that can be described as "half-natural and half-scholastic", which was to remain the official
doctrine for the teaching of modern languages in schools in France for the entire duration of the
AM.
Let us take from the mother the substance, the processes, the walk, the life of her
teaching; let us take from her all that we think we can take from her that which makes
her strength; but let us neglect nothing that can increase ours.
What makes the teacher inferior is the little time he has, the large number of students
he has to teach, and above all the advantage that the mother has over him: he is only
second to teach a language.
All his efforts must therefore tend to make every minute fruitful for all, to make of his
class one student in thirty, to make necessary what is, in short, for the moment,
superfluous. All his efforts must tend to help the memory, to fix the memory. For this,
the teacher has his own means; let him use them.
Let him make individual teaching follow simultaneous teaching. Let him substitute a
logically ordered plan for the steps imposed on the mother by the child's needs and
whims. Let him attach the fact to the rule and thus put the pupil in a position to build
himself with the materials he provides. Let him present in a bundle what the mother gives
only scattered.
To oral instruction, let him immediately add written instruction; to the teacher, the book;
to the lessons of the teacher, the work of the pupil; and since, finally, he has an advantage
over the mother, only one, alas! over her who has so many advantages over him: since
6
"Method" in the sense of "minimal unit of methodological consistency". The "method" is to methodology
what the seme is to semantics, or the phoneme to phonology (cf. Puren 2011b).
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he is dealing with a more mature reason, a more developed judgment, let him not fear
to give her and to ask her for more
7
. (1884, pp. 107-108)
From the 1920s, and for half a century, the debate is closed between the "natural" and the
"artificial". It is on the documents of work in class that will appear historically the question of
the authenticity.
2. Authentic documents
Two different periods can be distinguished, during which the notion of "authentic documents"
does not concern the same types of documents.
2.1. Authentic" literary texts versus non-literary texts
I have shown in my History of Methodologies that within the AM there are two opposing trends
among textbooks between "Active, Practically Oriented Textbooks" (APOT, in French CAOP,
chap. 3.4.2, pp. 164-167) and "Active, Culturally-Oriented Textbooks" (ACOT, in French CAOC,
chap. 3.4.3, pp. 167-171). They can be explained by the parallel or joint action of four different
parameters:
1) the cycle: daily life is privileged in the first cycle of school education, while in the
second cycle the interest shifts to intellectual and cultural life;
2) the resumption, this time no longer between dead languages and living languages, but
within living languages, of the debate between the modern humanities and the classical
humanities, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes or Dante having, for the supporters of the
latter, simply to replace Virgil or Sophocles;
3) the status of languages: some are considered more useful for commercial, political
and military matters (German and English), others more useful for artistic culture
(Spanish and Italian);
4) the level of immediate accessibility of the language for French speakers. This factor
converges with the above factor so that in some Spanish and Italian textbooks literary
texts are proposed as the only basic documents of the didactic units from the very
beginning of the learning process
8
.
It is among the promoters of the earliest and most intensive use of literary texts that the
argument appears that these texts are the only ones that are truly "authentic" because they are
representative of the "deepest" reality of the foreign culture. For the authors of L'allemand et
l'Allemagne par les textes (F. Berteaux and E. Lepointe, Hachette, 1924), for example
[...] Artists, like writers, express the deepest tendencies of a people. By placing their works
before the eyes of the pupils, one can not only give them a faithful and expressive
illustration of the texts they are studying, but also submit to their reflection authentic
documents on the foreigner, bring them to an exact representation of his concrete life in
the past and the present, and help them to understand his inner life, his psychic
development (Hachette, ed. 1927, Foreword p. VIII, emphasis added).
7
Girard's proposals concern the "elementary classes", which are the current primary classes. The first
attempt to generalize the early teaching of languages in French school education (from the class of 10e ,
the current CE1), took place in the 1880s and 1890s.
8
This was still the official orientation of the Spanish inspectorate when I began teaching Spanish in 1971,
and it remained so until the late 1990s. In his 2009 thesis on the didactics of Spanish, Pascal Lenoir used
the concept of "methodological ellipsis" to define and describe the direct passage from the active
methodology of the 1960s to the actional perspective of the 2000s, without going through either the
audiovisual methodology or the communicative approach.
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Ten years later, in the preface to another textbook from the same publisher, the second major
argument in favor of literary texts appears, which was very much in use at the time because it
was in line with the pedagogical orientation of the official "active methodology". The authors of
L'italien par les textes (E. Barincore and S. Camugli, Hachette, 1937) state in their preface:
[We wanted to put the students in immediate contact with authentic Italian texts, lively,
interesting readings, not without a certain literary value, so as to make them "live" their
class and especially their "vocabulary lesson". In this way, all their faculties will be put into
play: not only memory, but also reflection, will, sensitivity and even taste. A word, a
sentence that has moved, that has pleased, is not easily forgotten. (Preface p. V, I
underline).
We see in this passage that the claimed authenticity of literary texts is not only about culture,
but also about language. I can personally testify that for Spanish inspectors as late as the early
1970s, literary texts were also considered to be the only ones capable of providing students
with, as they put it, "models of authentic language," in contrast not only to the language of
texts produced by textbook authors, but also to the language, which they considered loose, of
newspapers and magazines. They advised young teachers to read the great classical texts with
pencils in hand to note beautiful expressions that they could reuse and have their students reuse
in class. This authenticity of literary texts in both language and culture was based on the classical
conception of art, where the Beautiful and the True are postulated to be intimately connected
9
.
Although the concept is not used explicitly for this other purpose, we also see in this passage
that the claimed authenticity of literary texts is also about the learning process: the last two
sentences of the quote are a good definition of what I proposed to call, in a 2021 essay,
"experiential," or the use of direct lived experience in the foreign language-culture classroom;
which all historical methodologies have used (by means of play, song, dance, theatrical
performances, literary workshops...., and of course by means of projects involving society
outside the classroom). It seems, however, that the term "authentic experience" has been
reserved for experiences in the country of the L2.
2.2. Authentic documents" versus fabricated documents
In the AM, the social situation of use aimed at is the school situation of learning: the cultivated
man is the one who can continue to train himself in his comments on the works of art - those of
literature, theater, cinema, painting, photography, etc. -, with the tools and the modes of
analysis, interpretation and appreciation learned at school. -In the communicative approach
(CA), the student is the one who can continue to use the tools and modes of analysis,
interpretation and appreciation learned at school. In the communicative approach (CA), on the
other hand, it is the social situation of use that becomes the sole model of the school situation.
This is why, at the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s, we witnessed an emphasis on
"authentic documents". But the notion now covers all documents not produced for teaching, due
to two parallel movements:
–the critique of the fabricated dialogues and structural exercises of the audiovisual
methodology (AVM), a methodology that had become established during the 1960s in the
undergraduate teaching of English and German, as well as in the teaching of French as a
foreign language (FFL);
–the criticism of the privilege given to the "cultivated culture" transmitted by all forms of
art, and mainly, in the teaching of languages, by literary texts, to the benefit of the
"anthropological culture", i.e. the culture governing the daily life of the people of the
country.
9
This explains the strong and long-standing reluctance, in the teaching of French as a mother tongue as
well as in that of foreign languages, to the idea of introducing "cursed authors" into the official programs.
Page 9 on 14
One finds then, in a particularly clear way in the young didactics of the FFL, where the
researchers are then very numerous and active, the two orientations which we observed at the
beginning of the preceding chapter, that of the APOT and that of the ACOT, with:
–on the one hand, a focus on authentic documents from everyday life: hotel entry forms,
shopping lists, restaurant menus, railroad timetables, extracts from radio and television
programs, "authentic" oral recordings, etc. Some specialists in French as a foreign
language would even like to develop, in opposition to the AVM elaborated on the basis of
fabricated dialogues, a "methodology of authentic documents" implemented on
"civilization files", and likely to take over from the AVM at a more advanced teaching-
learning level (cf. Puren 1984, T. 2, chap. 4.3.4. pp. 589-609)
10
;
–and on the other hand, a valorization of literary texts, about which I could write, at the
end of a study of the numerous publications on the question during the 1970s, that in
didactics of languages-cultures, " this cause seems to be definitively heard " (cf. Puren
1984, T. 2, chap. 4.3.1.1, pp. 487-508)
But the positions are no longer mutually exclusive: in the textbooks claiming to be based on CA,
which gradually supplanted AVM in the 1980s in the teaching of German, English and FFL,
fabricated documents, authentic documents from everyday life, journalistic, scientific and
literary documents are combined. The latter are logically becoming more and more important in
the second cycle of school teaching of all languages, because of their strong presence in the
baccalaureate tests. But this is also the case in FFL textbooks from level B2 onwards, as French
authors and publishers share the same literary culture, and thus respond to the demand of adult
learners of general French once they have acquired a certain level of communicative language
competence
11
.
With CA, the question of authenticity shifts again from documents to communication situations.
3. Authentic communication situations
The importance of the notion of "authentic situation" in CA is well known: learners are prepared,
in the early stages of learning, to handle certain situations of communication in a foreign
language-culture. In the Threshold Levels from the mid-1970s for the description of language in
terms of concepts and functions, as in the 2001 CEFRL for the descriptors of the A1-B1
proficiency levels, the macro-situation of communication is the trip abroad, in particular the
tourist trip.
In the AM, the aim was to prepare the learners to continue to maintain contact with the foreign
language-culture from home, for example by reading newspapers and magazines or listening to
radio or television programs in the foreign language. This situation of use was naturally related
to the school situation, so that the use of simulation of "authentic" situations in class would have
made no sense. To convince oneself of this, it suffices to do the following little mental
experiment, which is worth demonstrating ab absurdo: imagine a teacher distributing a text to
his students, and asking them to read it individually not as if they were there in class, but as if
they were at home in their living room, or abroad in an airport lobby or a hotel room...
10
They have only taken up more or less exactly, consciously or not, the didactic treatment of literary texts
in AM (cf. Puren 041).
11
Some of these adult learners are not even interested in the communicative skill itself. But the work
involved in acquiring it nevertheless allows them to acquire automatisms that will be useful later on in their
access to foreign "cultured" culture: it is easier to intensively repeat oral language forms than literary
expressions.
Page 10 on 14
With CA, there is a break between the situation of intended use and the learning situation, hence
the systematic recourse to simulation in order to recover the maximum ends-means homology
I mentioned earlier: the teacher will ask the learners to do not as if they were in the classroom,
but abroad, not as if they were among L1 learners, but facing L2 speakers, or among L2
speakers. The mechanical consequence is that the classroom situation, and in particular the
language exercises, are once again experienced as "artificial". It seems to me, however, on
second thought, the height of artificiality to simulate a natural environment in an environment
considered artificial.
There are three possible arguments against this bad case of artificiality made against language
exercises by the promoters of CA
12
.
–The first argument consists in recalling, as I did at the very beginning of my introduction, the
empirical evidence of the usefulness of these exercises: they may be artificial, but they prove
beneficial at least for some learners at certain times on certain points of language. And they are
felt by some of them as useful or even necessary, which is a sufficient reason to propose them
or let them do them.
–The second argument consists in denying that they are artificial in the didactic space and time
of the language course, where the teacher and the learners act jointly in the framework of a
preparation for communication with foreigners. I will take the example of the preparation of
professional footballers. They don't train to play soccer games just by playing games - doing
that is a sure sign of amateurism. They do, on and around the field, intensive drills focused on
physical abilities and technical and tactical skills, all of which are artificial in relation to the games
that will be played later against other teams, but which are perfectly authentic when they prepare
for them with their coach. For this preparation, they even participate periodically, sitting on
chairs in a room, in meetings about game strategies. On the one hand, there are "real" games,
on the other hand, there are "real" trainings, which no one would criticize for not being
"authentic". The trial of the artificiality of language exercises in a classroom or in a textbook is
just as absurd.
–The third argument appears with the latest methodological evolution, namely the social action-
based approach (SAOA) and its reference pedagogy, the project-based pedagogy.
4. Authenticity and social action-oriented approach
In the social action-oriented-approach (SAOA) that emerged in the 2000s, the school learning
situation is considered as a social situation of use in its own right: this is the very principle of
project-based pedagogy. This last methodological evolution makes a break with CA that the
authors of the CEFRL were unable or unwilling to see, and from which they consequently did not
draw any of the didactic implications. The idea of learning as a form of use appears explicitly in
chapter 2.1 "An action-oriented approach" (pp. 9 ff):
Language use, including language learning
13
, includes actions performed by people
who, as individuals and as social actors, develop a set of general competences, including
12
There are still some among the English and American educationalists, who still have a great influence
not only on teachers of English but also on the official orientations of English teaching in those countries
that Bala Kumaravadivelu calls "of the periphery". Cf. my analysis of the work of this Indian-born
educationalist, internationally known for his critique of eclecticism and his argument for "postmodern
pedagogy" (Puren 2022a).
13
The expression does not leave any ambiguity in French, nor does the English original (Language use,
embracing language learning (CEFRL, p. 9). The French translator of this document, on the other hand,
added to the English version a subtitle, "Characteristics of all forms of language use and learning", which
Page 11 on 14
language communication competence
14
. [...] The control of these activities by
interlocutors leads to the reinforcement or modification of skills. (CEFRL, p. 15)
The last sentence above is not without interest either, because it amounts to saying that if
learning is a form of use, use is also a form of learning: here we find the fundamental principle
of the "natural method", which is another principle of project-based pedagogy as developed in
France by Célestin Freinet. The ICEM (Institut Coopératif de l'École Moderne - Pédagogie Freinet)
devotes a page to it on its site where this "natural method" is defined in terms of ends-means
homology:
None, absolutely none of the great vital acquisitions are made by the apparently scientific
processes. It is by walking that the child learns to walk; it is by speaking that he learns
to speak; it is by drawing that he learns to draw. We do not believe that it is exaggerated
to think that such a general and universal process must be exactly valid for all the
teachings, including the school ones. And it is with this certainty that we have carried out
our natural methods, the value of which the scientists try to contest
15
.
At least two other elements of the CEFRL confirm the authors' recognition of the learning
situation as a situation of use - which is, moreover, a logical consequence of the principle of
ends-means homology:
–the fact that they consider the educational domain as one of the "major categories
relevant to language learning/teaching and use" (p. 10);
–the fact that, following the definition of the notion of "tasks", they propose as the (only)
school example a pedagogical project: "preparing a class newspaper through group work"
(p. 10).
Now, compared to CA, the fundamental characteristic of SAOA is that it posits social use not
simply as a learning objective, but as an end and a means for both use and learning, and both
in the micro-class society and in the external society. In this new conceptual framework, the
very notions of authenticity and artificiality are no longer relevant: this is the third argument,
announced at the end of the previous chapter 3, against the trial of artificiality made to language
exercises. Here are a few examples of document types specific in SAOA, it seems to me, any
"authentic versus artificial" categorization because the learning project and the social project
coincide and combine in the same perspective of social action within the classroom micro-
society:
1) Because the final products of social actions are complex, they often have to be preceded by
intermediate documents: preparatory note-taking, meeting minutes, summaries of a document,
seems to me to show that she had understood the evolution in progress even less than the authors of the
CEFRL: it is one thing to say that learning is a form of use, and another thing to say that use and learning
have the same characteristics.
14
This "in particular a competence to communicate" illustrates what I said above: the authors of the CEFRL
were not aware of the break between CA and AP that was caused by the new situation of use that they
assigned to language teaching and learning, namely social action in a foreign language in a multilingual
and multicultural society: the competence that AP must set as its objective, in fact, is no longer only
communicative competence, but a more general competence, "informational competence" or "information
literacy", which consists in being able to act on and through information as a responsible social actor. And
this particularly involves knowing what, why and to whom not to communicate (cf. Puren 2009b).
15
Cf. The Natural Method", page of the ICEM (Cooperative Institute of the Modern School - Freinet
Pedagogy, www.icem-pedagogie-freinet.org/la-methode-naturelle.
Page 12 on 14
syntheses of several documents, drafts and provisional versions, which are essential for
information control (see note 14 above).
2) These final productions themselves are also worked on collectively: the social action of the
learners then concerns texts in the process of common elaboration such as the documents shared
online, which can then be exploited didactically as documents in their own right, and this in an
orientation that is not only product-oriented (that of the writings produced), but also process-
oriented (that of the writing)
16
.
3) To enrich the documentation of a project, the groups of learners may have been led to select
authentic documents in L1 and to translate them initially into L2, possibly by means of an
automatic translator: these documents translated from L1 to L2 will then be used by them to
facilitate their global comprehension and then the presentation that they will have to make to
the large group with the objective that the original document be retained to integrate the
documentary file of the class.
4) It is perfectly possible to imagine real projects carried out by the learners on grammar or
lexical questions
17
: their final productions, in this case, will be metalinguistic documents as
authentic as the chapters of a grammar book can be. They will perhaps be less in line with the
reality of the functioning of the language, but certainly more in line with the reality of their
learning process, on which the teacher can then intervene directly.
Conclusion
I wrote in my 2009(a) article:
[Learning tasks are at the same time artificial; but whether we connote this artificiality
negatively is another matter, and certainly open to discussion: a pair of glasses, a pair of
crutches, a road bridge or a heart bypass are certainly artifacts, but they help people to
read, to walk, to circulate and even to live who could not do so without them: it would
seem quite absurd to criticize them because they are not "natural". It should be the same
in DLC, because artificiality corresponds very precisely to the specific help that a language
teaching-learning device can provide in relation to a natural acquisition situation. (p. 9)
And to support this idea, I called upon a quotation from Herbert Simon, whose most famous
work is entitled The Sciences of the Artificial: this is how he calls the "sciences of the engineer",
whom he defines as a designer of artifacts, of artificial devices:
The artificial world is centered precisely on this interface between the inner and outer
environments; it is concerned with attaining goals by adapting the former to the latter.
The proper study of those who are concerned with the artificial is the way in which that
adaptation of means to environments is brought about and central to that is the process
of design itself. (...) The natural sciences are concerned with how things are. (...) Design,
on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be, with devising artifacts to
attain goals (1969, pp. 113-114)
16
The equivalent can be found, but in individual mode, when the teacher asks students to rewrite their
productions from his or her answer keys; or in literature didactics, when learners work on writers' drafts
and/or different versions of their work.
17
This type of project is proposed by a teacher recently interviewed on the Café pédagogique website. Cf.
"Charlotte Gattulli: Travailler la langue au lycée aussi", Interview by Jean-Michel Le Baut, 21-11-2022,
www.cafepedagogique.net/2022/11/21/charlotte-gattulli-travailler-la-langue-au-lycee-aussi/.
Page 13 on 14
One could not dream of anything better than this quotation from Herbert Simon, Turing Award
(the "Nobel of Computer Science") in 1975 for his research on Artificial Intelligence and the
Science of Cognition, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978, to praise the artificial in the
discipline of intervention that is likewise DLC: it is in fact the whole field of this discipline that is
very precisely an "artificial world" of this type, with teachers doing what the Educational Sciences
have long called "pedagogical engineering", to design their devices as the most efficient
interfaces possible between learning action, teaching action and use action.
The artificial is at the heart of the language-culture teacher's profession, and this is why in
teaching-learning practices, fortunately, "drive out the artificial, it comes back at a gallop".
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