LES APPROCHES PLURIELLES DANS LE MODELE CARAP: SAVOIRS ACQUIS PAR L'INTERCOMPREHENSION

Abstract

Custom sets that teaching foreign languages refers to teaching and learning a language taken in isolation, within an essentially monolingual framework. Academic orthodoxy Chardenet (2007) refers to training the teacher in one foreign language only, following the unnatural preoccupation for the completion of knowledge and skills in this language. The dynamics of the societies forces towards the transition from monolingualism to multilingualism, by introducing the pluralistic like teaching devices. Defined as "teaching approaches that put into practice the teaching-learning activities while involving more (= more than one) linguistic and cultural variety," pluralistic approaches are designed as opposed to traditional teaching approaches, the aim of which is a particular language or culture in isolation (Candelier, 2007: 7). Intercomprehension is, along with the intercultural approach, the integrated teaching of foreign languages and awakening to languages, a pluralistic approach that allows the development of diverse and unthinkable emotional and practical knowledge and skills, inventoried in a Framework of reference for pluralistic approaches to languages and cultures (CARAP). Considered from different perspectives - as a method, strategy, training device or educational purpose - intercomprehension is mainly a general competence of the multilingual individual. A doctoral program attended at the University of Reims, France, as part of a team coordinated by professors J.E. Tyvaert and E. Castagne, has allowed us to experiment intercomprehension with a public trained for skills training for acquiring the perception and understanding of foreign languages not known a priori. According to Jamet (2010), it is a metalinguistic cognitive type activity (the awareness of areas of formal transparency and of significance), meta-pragmatic (the use of knowledge acquired in the native language to decide the needs triggered in a certain situation) and meta-cultural (by means of the encyclopaedic knowledge of the world), activity practiced by inferential type strategies. The regular observation of ICE type training sessions has led us to a reflection applied to non-philological learning environment. We consider that organizing a module of initiation in French for beginner economic students, a course relying on intercomprehension principles, would be an excellent introduction to multilingualism. In this paper we will tackle the knowledge that, according to CARAP, seems attainable by means of this alternative method of teaching - learning a language, in the light, even if only virtual at the moment, of the introduction of French in the curriculum by specific means of intercomprehension. Established as prolegomena to the traditional study, an introductory course of intercomprehension of French would be able to provide students with quicker global linguistic knowledge otherwise acquired in a longer period of time, with more effort and without guaranteed results.

Keywords

• pluralistic approaches, intercomprehension, skills, CARAP, didactics