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Didactics Seminar |
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| The
Official Instructions can be found in the B.O. (Bulletin Official de
l'Education Nationale) which is published weekly, and can be consulted in the
CDI (Centre de Documentation et d'Information). Recent editions can be found on
the web at http://www.education.gouv.fr/bo/,
but as the IO for English-teaching were published some years ago, they are not
electronically available at this site.
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| Each
work-group has a seminar project ; it is in two parts. First you will
put together a portfolio consisting of the outline of a learning sequence,
covering four to six week's work in a specific collège or lycée
class, and of the documents - pages from textbooks, articles or iconographic
documents, taped conversations that you have found or constructed yourselves,
realia and so on - that you would use to teach the sequence. There will be a
detailed plan of one hour's lesson. The second part consists in
'micro-teaching' this lesson ; each member of the group will take a different
part of the lesson, and will teach it to the members of the seminar, who will
be your pupils at that moment.
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| The
Functional Approach starts from the assumption that people use language to
do things with - they use language purposefully. Language, viewed from this
angle, can be analyzed as a toolbox, and it is the educator's business to
determine what tools learners need, and to help the learner identify them and
master their use. So, to take a simple and trite example, we may decide that
one of the things that people need to be able to do with language is to
establish social contact through greeting them and through presenting
themselves. We may decide that they language they need to do this will be along
the lines of 'Hello, my name's ...', or something of the kind. We might
identify a variety of different forms of greeting and presentation, each
appropriate in a different situation, with different actors. Working on these
with the learner, we would study that function. We will be looking at this
approach more fully during the seminars. See
Finocchiaro & Brumfit,
passim.
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| The Spiral Curriculum. This notion may first have been
advanced by the Moravian philosopher, Comenius (1592-1670), and has been taken
up and elaborated upon by the American developmental psychologist,
Jerome
Bruner. It can applied to most fields of learning and teaching : the idea
is that the learner starts with simple versions of each of the items to be
mastered and then, as she progresses, returns to them in greater and greater
depth. So a beginner might produce ; "I want some cake, please", while her
older sister might also be able to say "Would you be so kind as to pass me the
butter-knife, please?" See Finocchiaro & Brumfit, pp.
35-7.
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The Four Skills. These can
be looked at in the following way :
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Oral |
Written |
| Receptive |
Listening |
Reading |
| Productive |
Speaking |
Writing |
The most recent instructions have put a heavy stress on
the two oral skills, and these should be taught and practiced throughout the
school system. However, as the pupils grow older, so they should be expected to
master the written codes of a foreign language. Moreover, there are good
reasons to believe that extensive reading will have benefits for a learner's
oral skills.
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| Testing is a permanent part of a teacher's job ; you
test at every moment in the classroom, offering opportunities to pupils to use
language that has already been presented, and checking to see whether they can
handle it properly. Pedagogues usually distinguish at least two different kinds
of formal testing ; formative tests, which occur during a learning sequence and
which permit both learner and teacher to see how well they are doing and to
fine-tune their activities to what is actually happening, and summative tests,
which occur at the end of the sequence and inform both learner and teacher how
well they have done by reference to some external standard. We may also refer
to diagnostic tests, occurring prior to a learning sequence, and which are
supposed to help learners and pupils identify strengths and weaknesses, and
certificative tests, which are usually formalized and validated by an external
institution - the Bac, the Cambridge Proficiency or the TOEFL are examples of
these.
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Pratique
Raisonnée de la Langue or PRL. In the IO published in 1994, we
find that the third general objective is expressed thus :
Il (l'élève) exerce sa
réflexion sur les grands principes de fonctionnement de
l'anglais. The learner is expected to think about the language.
He will not simply learn the rules of grammar and apply them blindly,
but will examine and question the language. Ideally, he will construct his own
grammar ; it is the teacher's role to guide him through this process. The
teacher does this by offering the learner a corpus - a set of sentences
chosen for their use of a given structure, for example, or an authentic text in
which the structure is used several times - and by guiding him through an
analysis of how the language is constructed and used.
To work in such a way, the pupils needs a set of tools -
rules as to what counts as a proper explanation, discovery principles that help
her look for the salient characteristics of the language. These tools will
become finer and more complex as she works her way along the
spiral curriculum.
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Culture is a very complex concept ; anthropologists
have come to no agreement as to how to use the word, and Raymond Williams, in
Keywords takes five
pages to show how difficult it is to define. A vexed question in linguistics -
and in SLA - is how far a language can be 'disembedded' from the culture - or
cultures - in which it is widely spoken. A strict reading of the principles of
Generative Grammar might lead us to believe that you may learn a language
without needing any reference to culture at all.
However, both Functional
approaches to grammar - Halliday for example - and the work of sociolinguists
such as Dell Hymes - insist upon the idea that all performance is
culture-bound. Moreover, it is held to be part of the language-teacher's role
in the French school-system to open the minds of his pupils out to the ways and
workings of other cultures and other worlds. So for both theoretical and
institutional reasons, the teacher cannot pass culture by.
The idea of the
'cultural benchmark' (repère culturel) is that all native speakers share
a set of knowledge about the world - and in particular about their world - that
they draw upon when they converse with each other. Thus, for example, we may
assume that most English people will be able to pick up a reference to '1066',
or to 'The Lake District', while Americans will take it for granted that they
can talk about '1776' or the 'Fifth Amendment' without being misunderstood. The
learner will need to be able to pick her away among such cultural references if
she is to communicate successfully with native speakers.
So the teacher is
expected to introduce learners to some basic elements of cultural knowledge. It
is best to do this without having recourse to the 'Problems' approach which has
often informed the teaching of 'civilisation' ; pupils get very bored with 'The
American Black Problem', followed by 'The American Indian Problem' and 'The
Pollution Problem'. Although one may wonder whether young Americans who learn
French might not need a full course on 'The Problems of the French
Administrative System'.
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The Communication Gap ; the
basic idea is that for real communication to take place, there must be a
salient knowledge deficit between the partners in the communicative act - that
is to say that A must know something that B does not, that B must need to know
what it is, and that A should have a good reason for telling him.
A simple illustration can be taken from an ordinary
situation such as may be found in many language textbooks - we can imagine that
A is a diner in a restaurant and that B is the waiter. A knows which of the
items on the menu he wants to eat. B must get this information so as to carry
out the order. A has a good reason for telling B - he wants to eat.
Teachers will want to set up classroom exercises in such
a way that a Communication Gap exists, thus giving pupils a good reason for
talking to each other. But note that simply role-playing the customer and
waiter scenario will not fulfill the conditions necessary for producing a
Communication Gap in the classroom. For it to do this, it must have real
consequences of some kind for the lives of the pupils themselves.
Note also that the idea of the Communication Gap does
not cover all uses of language ; we may very well converse with someone when we
have no information either to give or to receive. Real world language is more
complex in nature than the idea of the Gap indicates.
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