Thinking about the didactics of languages/cultures, literatures and translation: crossed perspectives

Every language is taught in a social environment that has its own material and immaterial components: actors, purposes, strategies, values, representations, imaginaries, priorities, legitimating instances. Some languages are well documented, with a long tradition of description and teaching, while others may not have given rise to grammars, dictionaries, textbooks or translations. Language didactics, as a field of complex mediations, is by definition dependent on the degree of pedagogical inventiveness and "didactization" practices.

More than ever, the teaching-learning of languages invites us to reflect on the notion of space challenged by the communication technologies that invade our universe. The classroom is no longer a watertight compartment: the learner wishing to engage in a variety of partnerships, to share his productions with experts and distant natives, or even with the whole planet, can find himself, at the same time, in the classroom and in a parcel of the real world: both spaces having their own social rules their own authenticity.

Language learning, and attempts to intervene in this process in order to optimize it, raise a number of questions.

In this context, the privileged links that language didactics maintains with theoretical models from linguistics are obvious. When learning languages, we face a set of factors that linguistics has no control over. The teaching of foreign languages has long been isolated from social realities. However, it must take into account the geographical, historical and ideological contexts in which languages are used (or not) and studied (or not). The mix of observations and data from different contributing disciplines varies from one methodology to another, depending on our theoretical presuppositions, objectives, learning materials, curricula and forms of certification.

Today, no one can escape hypermobility. Confronted with unprecedented plurilingual and pluricultural situations, and articulating the various explicit and implicit constituent elements of the identity of one (or more) countries or communities, all language teaching constitutes a delicate balance between linguistic, cultural, communicative and interactional objectives without losing sight of institutional political will.

Appropriating a language, its culture, its literature, learning to translate means: developing skills and abilities, but also moving towards the discovery of the Other and towards a better knowledge of oneself, learning to think differently, in the face of norms (more or less constraining) and regularities (more or less predictable).

Program and abstracts in PDF.