THE NOTION OF RELATIONSHIP TO IN THE TEACHING AND LEARNING OF FRENCH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

In a teaching-learning context, the obstacle to the development of a skill may lie not, or at least not only, in the absence of the cognitive capacities to acquire that skill, but in the need to acquire it. Thus, it would be legitimate to ask why teach and learn French in countries where people are neither born nor live in French. As a learner from these countries, I can legitimately ask myself whether this language is indispensable in my daily life, whether it offers me prospects in terms of social and professional mobility, and whether it calls into question who I am as a speaker with my own language, culture, history and worldview. Beyond the emotional and identity-related questions, if it had to be taught and learned, how? What to teach and what to learn? We will attempt to answer these questions by drawing on our work on representations and the relationship to writing, which we will extend to the relationship to languages. From the teachers' point of view, we will be looking at how they feel about French, especially written French (psychoaffective dimension), the values and interest they attach to it (axiological dimension), the way they think about learning and teaching it (conceptual dimension), and their actual practices (praxeological dimension). Concretely, in the light of the research we have just outlined, we will present a questionnaire (its foundations and interest) that examined the relationship to languages, French and written French of Albanian, Romanian, Serbian and French teachers of French, as part of the DIDAFE project. This contribution is limited to the problem of the drastic decline in the number of French language learners in schools in Albania, Romania and Serbia. We have sought to identify precisely the factors that explain this drop in numbers by qualitatively analyzing teachers' statements, collected via a digitally distributed questionnaire survey. The results reveal reasons that relate, among other things, to conceptions of French as a difficult language, the preference for languages that offer professional and academic prospects, the dominant position of English as a universal language, and linguistic and educational policies.