The literature in
the teaching of the F.F.L (French foreign language)
Abstract:
The literary text is an artistic creation based on the dramatization of linguistic elements. This article is a reflection on the issues relating to the place of the literary text (the tale) in the FLE teaching in the middle school and the operation of its cultural potential. This discussion will be centered on learning a better taking into account the specificities of literary communication (including that of the tale) and its institutional among the vast field of literary production.
Keywords: literary texts, cultural, storytelling, exploitation
Each among arranges us own vision of the reading of an artistic creation. This practice lectural is very egocentric. It is this self-centeredness, ineluctable that paradoxically, would permit a reflection on the clean substance of the text. To try to give the sense to the acceptance of the other is above all a tentative to review the stereotyped representations. It seems to us that the didactic approach of the literary text should be examined like an experience comparable to a confrontation constantly renewed between writing and reading. The effort primordial of the reader is to co-create the sense from the textual elements.
The produced sense is the result of the interaction between reader - author and reader - text. It appears us that the understanding of a literary text results references and the reader's personal knowledge at a time that they are formal, cultural and emotional. One of stakes of the didactics of the literary text is therefore the reader's same implication in this report communicational. The opening toward the alliterate (the acceptance of the other) is translated by a stage that could be qualified of creative experience, the reader - actor becoming then a reader - creative or co - creative of a world constructs by the complex whole that regains it (traditions, belief, language, The present literary creation therefore the specificity to offer the co - creative - through its polyphony - a big interpretative liberty, product of knowledge to think cultural allowing him to understand the situational and contextual information clean to one time, a country and a culture. The stake in didactics can reside in this liberty directed of the reader that will be thus a creative and interpretative literary text space.
On the didactic plan the literary text is the more often feared by teachers in its only instrumental dimension: it is in himself focalizing on its finality - the research of the written language - that he first defines himself? If the choice of such an angle understands himself comfortably in the setting of the school practices; it proves to be problematic from the moment the text becomes the object of problematic others, notably the one of approach intercultural.
To give the sense to the teaching of a foreign language, it put the accent on the complex whole that it regains (social values, beliefs, etc.) and to put back in question the vision of the institution towards this formal system of construction of the sense. One of goals of the teaching of a foreign language is the knowledge of the literature and the culture of the country. Establishment tradition but contested today.
Indeed, such a representation of this sign system drove to a methodological renovation and a passage epistemological, considering the language as tool of communication, means of exchange between interlocutors who use it. Research of where is descended this work was interested in to clear specificities of the literary communication, for that to make, to study the theoretical and convenient foundations of it by the slant of questioning descended of constituent of this educational support (the literary text) put back. Contrary to a conception considering the literary language as written language separated in relation to the norm of the oral communication.
1. Modes of construction of the notion of the literary text
1.1. What's text?
The text challenges didacticiens and critiques. The notion of the "text" is not often definite in a lucid manner. It's the most often "means the speech" and its use varies according to theoreticians. So certain limit its value to the statement writes "literary", others give him a very large extension, the one of "movies ".
In accordance with the established use the text defines himself like "linguistic chain either spoken written forming a communicational unit and the speech like text in situation, product in a determined situation (participants, institutions, place, time)" (D. Maingueneau, 1996: 21).
It is also the product of a complex network of mechanisms extra and intra-linguistic; it serves to express a thought, it is therefore a discursive action.
All text must obey a major rule: "the textual" cohesion. This rule requires that all textual sequence fits in a convincing manner in its context to establish ties of significances.
Proceed there; seem to us him, the two objectives important of a text didactics:
- The kind of the text.
- The manner to edge the text.
1.2 What's a literary text?
Talking about the problem of the specificity of the literary communication received some various definitions. Of the antique until the XVIIe century, the term of "literature" designates an imitation of the real. The concept of the "beautiful" was placed to the second plan. It is only to the XIXe century where the term "literature" designated "beautiful letters".
It seems to us that the most satisfactory definition either the one of R. Jackobson that, name "poetic" function in a tentative to clarify functions of the language of which return account the diagram of communication.
According to R. Jackobson (1970: 15), "the poetic function is the function where the attention is centered on the message". In his first definition, in 1920, this linguist tried to show the unifying element of the sound and the sense, mentioning the example following, "I like Ike: I like Eisenhower".
Bringing closer the quoted example, we can notice that:
- The one that speaks (Subject) is inside two constituent of the sentence (V: like and the object: Ike).
- The Object is also in the verb.
To his definition words are united by the sound and the sense. In other words, the literary text is characterized by the union of the sense and the shape. The undisSociability of these two constituent some literary text shows indeed that all change of the shape leads ineluctably to a change of the bottom insofar as the summary, for example, serves to keep the main thing and to destroy the textual shape. This textual change leads to a destruction of the "aesthetic system of literary text ". Under this optics, P., Benichou (1973: 13) affirms that, "in the literary text the invoice is generating of the sense. It is the reason for which a survey separated of the bottom and the shape would let escape the main thing. The significance is inseparable of the shape that constitutes it".
We qualify therefore of "literary" all text whose shape contributes to give a supplementary sense of it.
1.3 Features of the literary text
Under the optics of incentive, the literary text, of by its functions (emotional and aesthetic), imply a textual and educational approach different of the one used for the functional text.
The first difference: The effect of the sense constructs by the one of interpretation regains an interpretative and semantic plurality as testifies B. Fradin (1984: 159): "all literary text is a priori susceptible to contribute to the emergence of a semantic value multiplicity that only generates him by interaction with environment ".
The second difference: The literary text actives the imaginary and the reflection on relations between the textual signs, a relation of the "textus". Under this angle, we appreciate the importance to prepare learning it for this level of construction of the sense of a text: mobilization of its linguistic knowledge and its strategies of training. However our pupils are not accustomed to such an intellectual autonomy, to make take them responsibility in the cognitive process of the passage of a linear reading to another analytic that U. Eco (1985: 65) names “interpretative cooperation”.
Indeed, the hold in conscience of their responsibilities and their statute of the reader - researcher gives them a feeling of valorization that encourages their activities to analyze in a more dynamic optics, proud of their rights to the liberty of the expression.
2. Measurements of the literary text
2.1 Aesthetic dimension of the literary text
The recognition of the literality of a text passes by his faculty to penetrate minds of lectors. The best servants of a language are writers who manipulate it and that, that making, the maximal exploitation of its potentialities. Their possibility to produce of a set of words of work chiefs, their esthete's vision, and creator of a world produces a certain resonance, capable to represent the world by the only power of the verb. The literary speech is a speech of the beautiful and the rhetoric whose thing presents him otherwise and words don't say all. The sensation to the art and the movement of words as undissociable whole of which the bottom and the shape found.
Then, the construction of the sense of a literary text not only requires a knowledge of the lexicon but rather a sensitivity to the coming and going that exists between words to construct the effect of the sense established by the writer. This level of sociability of the sense gives to words a life of aesthetics and a harmony of writing.
2.2 linguistic dimension of the literary text
The literary text is characterized by the set of ties that maintain him with the lexical characterization and the diagram first established by the author. The recognition of the semantic chain is indeed the relation that the movement of words assigns to construct the literality of a text.
The literary speech is constructed by the power of the rhetoric where words maintain between them of relations of "semantic and aesthetic". The literary language defers the one of the scientific text and the language of the dictionary by the good and the beautiful use.
For example, to summarize a scientific text makes himself usually but to summarize a literary text the destroyed because the sense of words mingles himself with links of significance that exist between says it and the non says.
2.3 Cultural dimension of the literary text
According to a critical conception the literary text constitutes the point of the "cultures crossing", it is the royal way to lead to the civilization and the development of a people's creativeness. But questions that stay important are: what literature? For what public?
These questions oblige us to verify the efficiency of the choice of the text assigned by the institution and room granted to this didactic support.
3. Place of the literature in the teaching /training of the F.F.L
3.1 Place of the literature in the didactics of the F.F.L
The traditional methodology proposes an instrumental "definition" of the literary text that can take several shapes according to codes (semantics, aesthetic and cultural). According to Y. Reuter (1990: 17), "the didactics of a language has for goal to drag the learning to the best models of the beautiful language that were a mine of the best possible texts for the survey of french".
Traditionally, the literary text is defined of this way like tool that encourages a reflection on the language. The problem comes from what the finality assigned to this teaching of grammar - translation grants no importance to the specificity of the literary communication.
With the communicative methodology generation, the didactics of the literature made a shy return in relation to the functional documents because "it seems therefore there to have flagrant contradiction between the recent orientations of the teaching of a foreign language and features of literary phenomenon" says Louis Porcher (1987: 23).
3.2 The big return of the literary text
In these last years, the literary text made return forces some; each tempts to enter in "writing" notably in intercultural approach. C. Tauveron says (2002: 14), that seems to have been one of the first to speak of the return of the literary text signals that " the literature, where that it is in didactics, takes an important room, because, finally, the learning, they, contrary to didacticiens, didn't know that she/it was only an oldie".
The recognition of needs of the learning and finalities assigned by the state gave birth to several defenders of the literary style. So the present interest carried to the literature comes for Y. Reuter of reasons that is several orders: " psycho-affective: the literature feeds the imaginary; emotional: the literature is the royal way that leads to the culture; methodological: the literature as reservoir of shapes and constructions of the norm".
The necessity to take in consideration the needs intellectual of the learning and the opening of their minds on the world constitutes the objective fundamental of the teaching of a language. He/it seems to us necessary to take the language as formal system of construction of senses and the social values as testifies Philippe Merieu (1999: 13) of it: "in my last book (…) I plead for the systematic survey of the classic literature (…) I thought that the underprivileged pupils had to learn to read in the of use of reading".