Dossier CAPES

A : Introduction

Objectives

If we read the first paragraph of the Official Instructions concerning the Ep/Dos, setting out the objectives, we may note that the examiners are expected to take into account the candidate's knowledge of :

• didactics : Science of teaching which takes the specificity of the subject as its starting point.
• pedagogy : Science of teaching which takes the characteristics of the learner as its starting point.
• the official instructions and programmes : the socially determined goals of language teaching. (This demands some reflection as to why we learn and teach foreign languages. The decisions taken by the ministry need to be placed within a wider perspective - political, social, economic).
• the history of the theory of language teaching, and of its application in the French school system.
• other school disciplines, leading to a reflection on the links that there might be between them, and on the means that can be employed to build such links within a specific establishment.

The examiners are not, however, simply interested in the candidate's knowledge base. They want you to demonstrate that you have thought about these matters, and that you have achieved a personal synthesis ; it is not enough simply to regurgitate the lessons that you have been given on the history of the discipline, or to restate the approach adopted by your favourite textbook.

You will also be expected to show that you are capable of communicating successfully ; this does not mean that you will take on the role of the teacher during the exam, but it does mean that you should do your best to be clear, convincing and capable of withstanding pressure.

The exam

As you see, you will have two hours to prepare your presentation and get ready for the interview. You will be given a dossier, which may be of several pages : here is an example of such a dossier. We will return to this later on in the lesson.

The exam falls into two parts :

• The candidate will present the dossier, demonstrating her understanding of the material, and making it clear that she has considered the three objectives :

• - linguistic :The pupils should be widening their means of expression and of comprehension in the target language
• - cultural:The pupils should be lead to reflect upon the cultures of English-speaking peoples. Care should be taken to avoid the anecdotal and the stereotyped.
• - cognitive:Through their study of a foreign language, the pupils should be acquiring some of the general skills in thinking and reflecting that it is the school's role to inculcate. This is one of the reasons why it is important to consider the role of language teaching in its relations with the teaching of other subjects, and also to have some knowledge of the ways in which children develop through their late childhood and adolescence.

• The second part of the exam consists of an interview, in French. The jury will ask the candidate to elaborate upon some of the points she has made during the first part of the test, and may ask for clarification of certain details. You should also show that you have given some thought to the ways in which the pupil is socialized into the city through the work she does in school and classroom.

Evaluation

Note that your command of the French language is one of the criteria that will be used in determining the mark. You should pitch your discourse between a relaxed and over-familiar chatty style, and an impenetrable jargon. Remember that the CAPES is both a test of knowledge and a rite of passage - you need to demonstrate that you are ready to fully assume the role of the schoolteacher, and to quit the role of student.

B : Towards a History of Foreign Language Teaching.

Over the weeks, we will be studying the history of language teaching. But it should not be thought that this implies that we should build up a dead knowledge of the subject, divorced from any reflection about its relevance for present practice. Nor does it mean that we should build up an image of progress from the foolishness of the past towards the semi-perfection of the present. As we shall see, many of our modern practices find their roots, or at the least a prefiguration, in the practices of our predecessors. Many of what we would now consider to be their errors derive more from their having different objectives, different institutional constraints, than our own, rather than from ignorance.

This does not mean that there has been no progress. In linguistics, in psychology, in the sociology of education, we now know more than we did one hundred years ago, and over some matters, our advance has been remarkable. In others, however, we find ourselves having to rely on hunches, common sense and strong black coffee just as our predecessors did.

I will not spend a great deal of time upon the earlier history of language teaching, fascinating as it is. Most of what we need to know occurred during the 20thC, and the greater part of that belongs to the second, rather than the first half ; our most recent history exercises the strongest hold over us. Nevertheless, today, I wish to begin with two precursors whose work we will, I believe, find particularly interesting.

Comenius:

Jan Amos Komensky (1592 - 1670)is often said to be the founder of the Didactics of Language ; for him, the word 'didactics' means 'the art of teaching'.

Comenius was a theologian, and his approach to didactics is a corollary of his theology : Man has fallen from his original state, and one of the major factors in his fall was the loss of the original tongue, at the Tower of Babel. For men to retrieve something of their old collective wisdom, it is necessary for them to learn each other’s languages.

But there must be a beginning, and this beginning is the learning of the mother-tongue ; there is no point in learning another language if one has not mastered one's own. After that, one should learn the languages of one's neighbours ; only after that should one take on the learning of one of the classic languages, such as Latin, Hebrew, Greek or Arabic.

Through language, we come to a closer understanding of the world : this is because language refers to things in the world, and these things in the world were put there by God. Hebrew, which is the closest to the original language, still retains some of its original clarity. It is from Hebrew that all other tongues derive their grammatical structures - Comenius holds the position that there are universal rules of grammar, although his reasons are not the same as those of Noam Chomsky in our own day.

But this is not the only reason for learning a foreign language. We also learn the language of our neighbours so as to be able to communicate with them.

How do we learn? The child learns through imitation - words are learned through the senses, which transmit their images to the brain. Only later does our learning become more abstract. All people learn in the same way, because all have the same needs - this is why there is one best method of teaching and learning a language.

We learn above all through use. But this does not mean that the rules of grammar can be neglected : 'The rules should aid and confirm usage', says Comenius.. Moreover, the learning process should be directed, and errors should be immediately corrected, otherwise the learner may get into bad habits. The learner, then, needs frequent opportunities to express him or herself, in situations where there is a guide who can stop her when she makes mistakes, and explain why the language she produces is incorrect.

Comenius sees the classroom as being the site of collective endeavour ; children should work together in groups, each group having a captain, who directs the work. The more able pupils help their comrades to learn - in a process that he refers to as 'mutual teaching'.

Because there is one true way of learning, and because Comenius knows what it is, the role of the teacher is reduced to that of applying the textbook. The textbook has been written with an eye to three basic principles :

1. The principle of sensuality: All knowledge is acquired through the senses, and particularly through sight.Comenius writes :

   "Les maîtres doivent tenir pour règle d'or que chaque objet doit être présenté à celui des sens qui convient (les objets visibles à la vue, les sonores à l'ouïe, les olfactifs à l'odorat, les savoureux au goût, les tangibles au toucher). Et si un objet peut être saisi par plusieurs sens à la fois on aura soin de le leur présenter en même temps." "Qu'à notre école ceci soit la règle : (que) tout ce qu'il faut connaître sur les choses ... soit enseigné à l'aide des choses elles-mêmes, c'est-à-dire que l'on présente selon les possibilités, les choses réelles ou leur image, pour qu'on puisse les voir, les toucher, les entendre et les goûter, etc."

2. The principle of order:There is a 'natural order' to human learning. We begin first by learning from 'the book of nature', looking to the exterior, and learning about things in the world. Next we move on to study 'the books of man', turning our regard towards the interior, and examining ourselves. Finally, we read the 'holy books', looking to God and the world beyond.

   There is also a natural order to teaching : the teacher begins by giving examples, then moves on to give the rules, and finally asks the pupil to do exercises, to put into practice what he or she has learned.

3. The principle of pleasure: Comenius held that learning should be enjoyable - as enjoyable as play. Corporal punishment - which was common in schools at that time - should be eschewed.

In his textbook Orbis Sensualium Pictus Comenius attempted to produce a playful approach to language-learning. Designed to teach Latin to speakers of German, it has a basic vocabulary of 3,500 words, and is divided into 151 chapters. The sentences are presented in such a way that the illustrated vocabulary is easily situated - to each word in the text corresponds a number, which in turn directs the reader to the object in the accompanying illustration.

Although Comenius usually pays little attention to phonological matters, in the Orbis he does make some attempt to provide a guide to pronunciation. It is of some interest to look at how he does this - note the use of the image : Comenius intended his textbooks to be studied in a progressive fashion. The learner must always go from what is known to what is unknown, and the presentation of material is cyclical, so that nothing that is studied is completely new, but represents the development of knowledge already acquired. First, he says, we should learn how to babble, then how to speak with precision, next, how to express oneself with elegance and finally how to master the full rhetoric of a language.

Gouin

In 1880, François Gouin published L'art d'enseigner et d'étudier les langues. He begins with an account of his own efforts to learn German : having learnt German in his lycée, he went to a German university, where he rapidly became conscious that he understood little of what was being said. He therefore decided to study the grammar of the language - but had no greater success in understanding. Subsequently, he learnt his dictionary off by heart - but made no progress in his understanding of what was said to him. However, he noted that French workmen, who had come to Germany to make their bread, were able to understand and converse with their peers. He concluded that he should study the ordinary, everyday language of the country.

He returned to France, and there found himself in conversation with his nephew, who, when he had left had been unable to speak, but who, six months later, was able to hold his own in a conversation. This convinced him of the inefficiency of his own methods, and he decided to watch the child, to see how he picked up his language. One day, the little boy was taken on a visit to a mill. He continually asked questions, climbed all over the place, and watched what the workers were doing. Back at home, the child reflected on his experience, and then recited it to his listeners, ten times over, with variations, attempting to produce a logical sequence of activities.

After thus expressing himself, the child became active; with the aid of the adults, he constructs a miniature water-mill, fills sacks with sand, and plays out to his own satisfaction the scenes that he had observed during the day. What he had done, according to Gouin, was to construct the series of events, structured according to a logical progression, and accompanied, at each stage, with the appropriate language.

This was to give Gouin his basic approach to language learning. But before we see the method, let us turn to his theory of language. Comenius and many of his contemporaries had seen language as organized around the naming of the world. For Gouin, language essentially turns around the verb, which is at the basis of every proposition. Furthermore, there are three kinds of language :

1. - objective language - with which we express our perceptions of the external world - here, his nephew describes the mill, and the activities that go on in it.
2. - subjective language - with which we express our own feelings about what we have described - so the child interlarded his recitation of the workings of the mill with expressions such as 'C'est ça!' or 'C'est bien!'
3. - figurative language - which is the way we express pure ideas, through symbols taken from the real world.

The learner enters the FL in a similar way to that by which the child enters the ML. The learner first creates a mental representation of real world events, taken in by the senses (not abstract rules of declension or conjugation) The perceptions are put in order, and are thus transformed into knowledge ; the child, constructing his knowledge of the mill, put the facts into order according to their succession in time - that is to say, according to the relationship between cause and effect. Moreover, the child also uses the relationship between the end and the means. Thereafter, there comes a period of incubation of around 5 or 6 days. These three factors form the basis of the 'natural method’ that Gouin proposes.

Let us look at one of the series and see how it works :

First of all, the teacher gives the title of the series in the L1. Then he goes through the series in the L1, ending each phrase with a reiteration of the verb ("Je vais à la porte - je vais"). Then he goes back to the first phrase, gives it once again in the L1, and then repeats the verb, several times, in the L2. He goes through the series like this, end then returns once again to the beginning, and goes through it once again, but in the L2.

The teacher then asks each learner to go through the series. Each of them becomes the teacher, in turn - Gouin speaks of 'the multiplication of masters'

(If you wish to comment or ask a question, please write to tmason@timothyjpmason.com)