PROPOS SUR LE SAVOIR-FAIRE DES ETUDIANTS NON-PHILOLOGUES ACQUIS PAR DES APPROCHES PLURIELLES. ETUDE DE CAS : LE METALANGAGE

Abstract

The Framework of reference for pluralistic approaches to languages and cultures (CARAP), developed in 2007 under Michel Candelier’s coordination is an imperative instrument for all the teachers and decision makers preoccupied with the didactic stances of plurilinguism. Much less known than the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, CARAP provides an inventory of knowledge, attitudes and skills the students will get to master within certain plural didactic approaches, oriented towards the development of plurilinguism. These didactic approaches are profoundly original compared with a traditional training path. We will consider as a reference point for our reflection one of the most promising and dynamic plural approaches: intercomprehension, more exactly the model developed by the InterCompréhension Européenne (ICE) team of the University of Reims, France. The census of knowledge, attitudes and skills allows a systematic look on linguistic and cultural realities that the future plurilinguistic individual is meant to assimilate. Our attention will be focused on skills. Attending the ICE meetings made us familiar with a running manner excluding the preoccupation for the acquiring of a complete foreign language grammar, circumscribed to assuming its partial knowledge, in one or two of the competences defining it (written and oral understanding). The results of the experiments allow us to state that a minimum of grammar is enough to get the access to the global understanding of texts written in a foreign language: « intercomprehenders » getting involved in the global understanding of foreign languages previously unknown, related to their mother tongue, using a very reduced metalanguage, complementary with a wide range of relieve strategies. This observation has led to our professional activity, marked by the recurrent confrontation with the reality of teaching classes – economic students’ inability to remember, understand, and naturally use a significant part of the grammar metalanguage acquired in their mother tongue. To emphasize this, we applied an empirical survey related to the fundamental grammar terminology in their mother tongue and interpreted the answers of a significant number of first and second year students of the Faculty of Economics. The results prove a disquieting inability to manage the already acquired morphological and syntactical categories within grammar analysis of mother tongue and subsequently transferred to the process of teaching-acquiring foreign languages. We have established a contiguity between the natural path in a training session in ICE type intercomprehension and the didactic path in institutional education, concluding that (1) a simplification of the grammar taught within traditional education is beneficial for students and teacher and that (2) the use of certain intercomprehensive techniques, such as the parangon, is extremely profitable when approaching certain aspects connected to foreign language grammar.

Keywords

• intercomprehension, skills, metalanguage, CARAP, parangon