Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Literature- Writing- FLE

What can one do with literary texts in a class where French is being taught as a foreign language? What kind of texts? How to use them? To what precise end? With students of which level? Should literary texts be as important as actualities or journalistic texts? Should one teach literature in a class where French is being taught as a foreign language (FLE)?

Numerous are the questions that French teachers ask when discussing the need for literature in a FLE class. More so because, for the most part, students learning a foreign language, have a certain innate fear and a real dislike of literary texts. These texts “exquisite”, “elegant” and “rich” become for them “complex”, “superfluous” and “insular”! Is this because one feels that literature is only for the literary? But this is just a mindless cliché, a stereotype that one needs to analyze more closely?

In the framework of obtaining of obtaining a Masters in FLE (French as a Foreign Language), I am interested in these problems that led me to do research on “The place and manner of reading poetry in FLE classes” for my Masters I. But literature is not limited to poetry. Moreover, theoretical reading does not necessarily lead to a concrete results.

It is for these very reasons that I decided to test “the waters” by putting into place a creative literary project called STAGORE (a word that is made up of the names of two giant literary figures from France and India: Stendhal and Tagore).

This entails offering Indian students (an-on going experiment with students of level B1 of CECR) various activities based on creative literary writing. The principal aim is to make them aware of literary texts and to encourage them to write creatively. Thus they will be able to “get a lot of pleasure from texts” (Barthes) either by reading or writing them.

We are also planning to start a writers workshop in mid-March so that literary writing can take on a wider context. The final results will be published in the form of a blog and will also be inserted onto the official site of the AF de Bombay.

Thanks to the University Stendhal Grenoble III and the Alliance Française of Bombay.
Thanks to Mr. Jean-François Massol (Director of my thesis), Mr. François Mangenot, Mr. Thierry Soubrié, Mme. C. Cavalla.

Mr. François Dupuis, all the teachers and students of the AF of Bombay.

Atafia Azzouz, Juliette Lamarche, Delphine Combaz, Julie Tamanini and Florence Béquart