TIPA. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage (Jun 2020)
Le corps translangageant médiateur de sens
Abstract
Talking about the body means at the same time questioning the boundaries that exist between oneself and others and the ambiguity of the oscillations between being and appearing, the visible and the invisible, being and having; taking an overall look at practices and techniques of the body.(Marzano, 2017, p. X)The translanguaging body as mediator of meaning: an enactive-performative approach to modern language learning at school The practices and techniques of the body, as emphasised by a growing number of educational researchers, have their rightful place in the language course(s) taught and experienced at school (Aden, 2008, 2013; Azaoui, 2014; Eschenauer, 2014, 2018; Lapaire, 2011; Soulaine, 2010; Tellier, 2010, 2014; Trocmé-Fabre, 1999, 2012). To the central question of this issue "how does the body of speakers co-construct discourse and meaning in didactic speech?", I will respond with a look at the discourse rooted in the living. As Hélène Trocmé-Fabre (2012) reminds us, the living emerges from its history, adapts to its environment and transforms itself in time and space. The same is true of living languages (langues vivantes) and, at their heart, speeches. In fact, productions and language interactions manifest themselves in the "in-between" (inter), in the individual and joint action that creates meaning. It is a question of entering into reciprocity (p.115), of constructing a common space-time (p.116). Sensoriality, emotions, movements of the gaze, of the face or of the whole body, positioning in space are intrinsically linked to non-verbal and verbal language. In this article, Foreign Modern Languages (FSL) are presented in their complex physical nature (Aden, 2008; Eschenauer, 2014), in relation to French, the language of schooling, and to the family languages of the pupils. This paper shows the implications for language didactics.The theories of embodiment and, more precisely, the enaction paradigm proposed by Varela (1988, 1989), at the crossroads of phenomenology (Husserl, 1913; Merleau-Ponty, 1942) and cognitive neuroscience, will allow us to set the framework for the challenge of physical engagement in a didactic situation. Multimodality will thus be defined in the enactive paradigma.The question of particular interest to us in this article is the impact of the use of the mediating function of the body language by artists, teachers and students in the classroom on the understanding of meaning and the production of speech in a foreign modern language. Two sub-questions guide our reflection: what multimodal strategies enable learners to access meaning? How does learning to perceive/interpret the different modalities of access to meaning enable pupils to produce/interact/create by diversifying the use of these modalities? I first present the co-construction of discourse and meaning at the interface of the emergence of languages, empathy (Davis, 1980) and aesthetic experience (Baumgarten, 1750; Dewey, 1934; Schaeffer, 2015). Finally, I illustrate my comments with some results from the longitudinal and qualitative study AiLES (Arts in Language Education for an Empathic Society), in which I followed for four years a cohort of students from a middle school in an underprivileged area, where the languages German and English were taught together in an enactive-performative approach (Eschenauer, 2017; Aden & Eschenauer, 2020). This approach, as its name suggests, is based on two epistemologies of the relationship. Enaction, a paradigm of the ecology of embedded cognition, is implemented through performativity, in its dimension which is both linguistic (Austin, 1970) and artistic (Fischer-Lichte, 2004), as we detail in the article.Varela (1989,1992), a neurophenomenologist researcher, has proposed the paradigm of enaction to designate the emergent, complex and situated nature of cognition. For him, the human being is made up of language in the phenomenal sense. The act of languaging (Maturana & Varela, 1994: 204) is a situated, social and reflexive act, a joint action involving the whole body, itself inextricably linked to self-awareness and intellect (Varela et al., 1992). Every social act is an act of language and every act of language is the basis of learning processes. Varela does not use the term 'multimodality', but he refers to the different modalities of language, both verbal and non-verbal, and emphasises their intertwining. His understanding of language as a complex phenomenon rooted in our bodies allows me to evoke a multimodality of language extended in an enactive sense. For me, sensoriality, emotions and empathy constitute means of relationship, therefore modalities of language. Multimodality is sometimes invisible, inaudible, but it is always perceptible. Language thus has a function of mediating meaning between oneself and others, but also between oneself and oneself through perceptions, imagination, the generation of ideas, silent thoughts; and between oneself and the environment (the environment takes on meaning and is constructed in the relationship with the subject).This assertion of uncommon language in the context of language didactics implies the creation of new models which are always adapted to the environment, taking into account and soliciting the emergent and multimodal nature of language as we have defined it above. To facilitate it, we have for our part proposed an enactive-performative approach to languages (Eschenauer, 2018; Aden & Eschenauer, 2020), i.e. in which artistic performance becomes a means of implementing enactive language didactics.Performance, like enaction, is rooted in Husserl's phenomenology. It relies precisely on the acting body (the Körper body that one has) and the perceiving body (the Leib body that one is), space and relationship, to bring out the meaning of discourse (Fischer-Lichte, 2004). The performative arts that we offer in our modern language teaching systems require a variety of teaching postures. They allow the teacher to leave a transmission posture to become a co-creator of meaning with his or her students. The pupils create stories with the communicative means at their disposal, using gestures, mimics, emotions, movement in space, proxemics, but also verbalized languages. When they do not have the language skills, they use mediation strategies in the enactive sense (Aden, 2013, Eschenauer, 2017), including codemeshing and codemixing if necessary, or sometimes even translation. They therefore sometimes use their first languages, which are valued and linked to the languages of the school (i.e. German, English or French). In this way, they develop translingualism (translangageance) skills (Eschenauer, 2014, 2017). Translangageance is a concept that I proposed in my thesis in line with the work of Cen Williams (1997) and Ophelia Garcia (2009) on translanguaging, as an ability to draw on all its linguistic registers. Joëlle Aden introduces the bodily dimension into this capacity to act by translangager. I myself use the suffix "ance" to underline the fluid process of languaging that emerges during performative activities. The prefix "trans" underlines the transversal character of a discourse benefiting from a plural identity, but also the transcendental aspect of the metacogintion phases during which pupils become aware of the richness and nature of languages. Formal learning accompanied by teachers is born from a need to speak in languages, aroused by the imagination of the pupils on stage and shared between them through scripted situations. Pupils use corporality to understand an utterance in foreign languages and to react/interact appropriately; to fluidify a discourse; to support a discourse. These four strategies will be illustrated in the article.Performing theatre practice, because of its aesthetic nature (Baumgarten, 1750; Dewey, 1934) and the (inter)subjective involvement of the student actors in the space, also develops their psychosocial skills (Rittelmeyer, 2017) - especially social and emotional skills and empathy competencies (Aden, 2008, 2010; Sambanis, 2013) - as well as their intercultural (Hoffmann et al., 2008; Sting et al., 2010) and linguistic (Hoffmann et al., 2008; Sting et al., 2010) skills. The objective of this didactic approach is not a task that would have been formalised in detail in advance by the teacher, but an event, a situation that occurs and evolves in a teacher-pupil co-creation.The results of the studies I have conducted, including the AiLES (Arts in Language Education for an Empathic Society) longitudinal study, show that a balance of physical (sensory-motor and emotional), intellectual (linguistic, metacognitive) and social (empathy) involvement in their learning leads pupils to language autonomy. The AiLES study also shows that awareness of the effects of multimodality - in the enactive sense - on discourse leads to superior language skills. The excerpts of corpus analyses in the article help to illustrate these results and to specify the modalities of the translanguaging enactive-performative approach.
Keywords
