What "teaching grammars" for language teaching?

Filière Didactique des Langues & the UMR 8202 SeDyL Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO), Paris and Réseau Grammaires et contextualisation (GreC), Méthodal Open Lab, University of Cyprus

What "teaching grammars" for language teaching?

In fact, whether we're talking about a foreign language taught to francophones or French taught to allophones (FLE), these language didactics (DDL) questions relating to the role and forms of grammatical activities are of the same order. DDL has gradually abandoned its exclusive or privileged reference to language sciences. But this relationship between language teaching and description(s) still remains to be problematized.

This colloquium revisits the linguistic resources called upon for foreign language teaching and, in particular, the nature of the know-how and "non-scholarly" knowledge involved:

Didactic transposition
It aims to better characterize transposition skills, particularly those of teachers of foreign languages to French speakers. It has been shown that language teachers have developed a skill for transposing grammatical knowledge, in terms of managing terminology, highlighting examples, mnemonic devices, using diagrams, etc. (e.g., the maison d'être for choosing the auxiliary in compound tenses; the "hamburger negation": (ne verbe pas), in FLE). It is important to better characterize and publicize these didactic transposition practices.

Contextualization of descriptions
The most common linguistic resources called upon for teaching are reference descriptions. These are produced by linguists and have no didactic dimension, as this is not their role. But teachers have also learned, over the years, to contextualize the descriptions of reference grammars, i.e. to bring them closer to learners by introducing variations, even innovations.

One form of this contextualization is that which concerns descriptive categories and their naming: how do teachers present and name for French-speaking learners the notion of aspect in Slavic languages or that of preterite in other Indo-European languages? How do they describe the absence of noun determiners or, on the contrary, their use in the target language compared to the first language? How are similar but different descriptive categories, or those without equivalents from one language to another, "transposed", renamed or redefined with first-language terms, so as to make them more readily available to learners' metalinguistic resources? One example of transposition is the teaching of French in China: French grammatical terminology has been translated into Chinese, i.e. replaced by analytical or pictorial definitions: the French pronominal verb is "translated": 代词式动词 (pronoun-type-verb). One proven contextualization approach is to use categories from the learners' first language to describe the target language (e.g. in Turkey or Lithuania, for FLE, use the case category to describe noun complements of French verbs or sentence complements (of place, time...).

Teachers' contrastive expertise and contextualization of descriptions
These deviations from the "official" reference descriptions originate in the concern to remedy specific language acquisition difficulties attributable to negative interference. Teachers of a given language for a given audience have developed a contrastive expertise: they have identified recurrent and persistent faults, not specific to individual learners (= i.e. marking a moment in the evolution of their interlanguage) but common: they don't concern all learners, but they are noted collectively and over time. These predictable errors are attributed to learners' superimposition of the first language on the target language. To better manage these expected errors, teachers are often called upon to create "tailor-made" descriptions, as these do not appear in reference grammars for learners of any language. These descriptions call on the teaching skills described above. They are either personal teaching resources and therefore not disseminated, or they form part of grammars produced locally by teachers, or they are part of contrastive grammars. This long-standing tradition in language teaching seems to have been lost to acquisition research. These "teaching grammars" are the manifestation of teachers' metalinguistic creativity. And they deserve better than pedagogical confidentiality.

Bi/plurilingual conceptualizations
Teachers are also in a position to call on learners' metalinguistic resources, their personal knowledge of how the target language works, often developed in relation to their interlanguage. These intuitions, described as epilinguistic by A. Culioli, can manifest themselves in spontaneous comments. But we can also create the conditions for them to be verbalized in class, to "make people think the language aloud" - so-called conceptualization activities. The contexts that make such verbalization possible are created in non-transmissive, reflective classroom activities. One possibility is to get learners to react to a fact of language present in different forms in both languages (or absent from one of the two languages) and, more broadly, to contrastive/comparative observation activities on corpora, comparing the target language and the first language. This form of collective reaction to linguistic functions, whose differences are often visible, enables learners to propose descriptions spontaneously and unbiased by previously acquired grammatical knowledge. Indeed, these similarities/differences are not described in reference grammars, which are monolingual. These detours through another language produce observations that develop and nourish teachers' contrastive expertise. The perspective of plurilingual education invites us to extend these analyses of learners to other languages known to them or in the process of being learned.

This symposium focuses on all these metalinguistic resources created or used by teachers, known as "teaching grammars", to organize grammatical activities in the classroom.

Communications
Expected communications are those of teacher-researchers of foreign languages to francophones or of French to allophones.

They will illustrate their practices and describe their didactic research and reflections on this issue of language teachers' metalinguistic creativity skills, namely:

- their resources for transposing scholarly grammatical knowledge, that of reference grammars;
- their experiences and research in relation to contextualized grammatical descriptions, in particular by adapting target language grammar to French grammar or by adapting French grammar to target language description (FLE) ;
- their experiences and research relating to contrastive target language/first language descriptions and comparative/contrastive activities carried out in the classroom;
- their experiences and research relating to learners' contrastive metalinguistic verbalizations, designed to facilitate learning by means of the detour via one or more other languages, in a plurilingual perspective.
Presentations can be bilingual with powerpoint, one of the two languages being French.

Timetable and procedures for submitting a paper:
- Publication of the call: January 18, 2024
- Receipt of paper proposals: Paper proposals will include, in a Word or Open Office format file (3000 signs maximum spaces included):
- title
- first and last name of the author(s) / institutional affiliation
- keywords (5 maximum)
- abstract
- essential bibliographical references (5 maximum).

They should be sent to GreC.INALCO.2024[at]gmail.com + celine.peigne[at]inalco.fr before May 15, 2024.

- Notification of selected papers: July 15, 2024
- Holding of the symposium: October 9 and 10, 2024

Symposium organizers:
Jean-Claude BEACCO (Sorbonne Nouvelle, DILTEC), Céline PEIGNÉ (INALCO, SeDyL)

Scientific committee:
Arslangul Arnaud, UMR 8563 CRLAO, INALCO Paris
Bazantay Jean, UMR 8043 IFRAE, INALCO Paris
Barontini Alexandrine, LACNAD, INALCO Paris
Beacco Jean-Claude, GreC and EA 2288 DILTEC, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Dao Hui-Linh, UMR 8563 CNRS-EHESS-INALCO, INALCO Paris
Fouillet Raphaële, GreC and EA 3706 LLSETI Université Savoie Mont Blanc
Forlot Gilles, URM 8202 SeDyL, INALCO Paris
Guo Jing, EA 4514 PLIDAM, INALCO Paris
Hirashima Rika, University of Kansai
Horne Fiona, University of the Witwatersrand
Kakoyianni-Doa Fryni, Methodal-GreC, University of Cyprus
Kalmbach Jean-Michel, GreC, University of Jyväskylä Kasazian
Emilie, Laboratoire Savoirs, Textes (UMR 8163 - CNRS) and GreC, University of Lille Kang
Shin-Tae, EA 4514 PLIDAM, INALCO Paris
Peigné Céline, EA 4514 PLIDAM, INALCO Paris
Tan Jia, National Research Centre for Foreign Language Teaching Materials, Beijing Foreign Language University (BFSU)

Organizing Committee:
Peigné Céline, M1 and M2 DDL students