Actional perspectives and cultural perspectives

in language and culture didactics:

towards a co-cultural co-actional perspective

Version originale française disponible: www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/2002b/

Traducción española disponible: www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/2002b-es/

Abstract

In this article, the author reviews the succession, in French school foreign language teaching, of the different methodologies that have been developed, by showing how each one has been built on a mode of adequacy between its action perspective (i.e. the actions that it prepares students to carry out in a foreign language) and its cultural perspective (i.e. the cultural competences for which it prepares the students). He defends the idea that the new (social) action-oriented approach proposed in the Council of Europe's Common European Framework constitutes a rupture from the action perspective of the communicative approach, and that it therefore implies a rupture from the cultural perspective that was linked to it, that of the intercultural. Finally, he outlines what the new corresponding coherence should be, which he calls "co-actional-co-cultural perspective", while specifying that in the framework of the "complex didactics" that he promotes, it is not a question of substituting this new coherence for the previous ones, but of adding it to the panoply of instruments already available for the management of the teaching/learning process.

This article, published in 2002, is the first one that the author wrote on the "perspective actionnelle" ("perspective actionnelle" in the French CEFR, "social action approach" in the CFERL, upon publication of the final version of this Council of Europe publication in 2001.

Also downloadable from ResarchGate.net: www.researchgate.net/publication/351287242.