Didactics of languages-cultures at the crossroads of methods. Essay on eclecticism

Abstract

This English electronic edition of my Essay on eclecticism (www.christianpuren.com, December 2025, 1994e-en), is published with a new afterword thirty years after the first edition of this work in French (Essai sur l'éclectisme, CRÉDIF-Didier, 1994 (1994e), and five years after its Spanish edition (2021, 1994e-es). Originally designed to analyse and understand the constant empirical eclecticism of teachers as they seek to adapt to their learners, as well as the rise of this eclecticism in French as a foreign language textbooks during the 1980s, this essay leads to an awareness of the need for language and culture teaching to address the issue of eclecticism from a disciplinary theory perspective. To this end, I have drawn on theories of complexity in the exact sciences and the humanities, relying in particular on the work of French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin. In the year this essay was published, I proposed the concept of ‘complex language teaching’ to characterise the fundamental epistemological nature of the discipline, and this concept has been present ever since in all my work (see the references given in the afterword to this English edition of December 2025, entitled precisely "From Eclecticism to the Complex Didactics of Language-Cultures", pp. 3-4). Eclecticism can only be perceived in classroom observations and textbook analyses if one expects to see a strong and unique overall coherence implemented at all times. Once we abandon this illusion, what we observe in classrooms and textbooks is no longer eclecticism, but the management of complexity. Contrary to what Bala Kumaravadivelu believed (see 2022b-en), the new epistemology of complexity does not lead us into a "postmethod condition", but rather towards multiple coherences (see 058) and multi- and pluri-methodological approaches (see, for example, 2022g-en and 2025c-en). Finally, AI can be used collectively in language classes by teachers and students to manage complexity, offering an "augmented methodology" for using textbooks, provided that it is supplied with multi- and pluri-methodological analysis models (see 2025m-en).