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The purpose of this contribution is to deepen the interdisciplinary approaches adopted in university pedagogy dedicated to the teaching of French as a foreign language (FLE), paying particular attention to the training of teachers. By favoring originality and applicability, we offer a careful study, supported by concrete experiences and practical cases. Based on an exhaustive analysis of the scientific literature, this essay explores three main axes of interpretation: (1) the integration of emerging technologies in the teaching of FLE, (2) the cultural and social dimension inherent to learning of FLE, and (3) innovative approaches in the evaluation and measurement of linguistic skills in FLE. This research enriches the field of university pedagogy by offering innovative perspectives and highlighting the importance of interdisciplinarity in the training of FLE teachers. The results presented open new perspectives for future investigations in this constantly evolving field.

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In foreign language teaching, socio-linguistic competence, socio-cultural competence and intercultural competence is one of the most important skills that learners are supposed to acquire. Defi coursebook is designed for learners who learn French as a foreign language. In this study, inclusion of cultural elements in French coursebooks Defi A1 and A2 has been analyzed in four cultural aspect categories which are “product, person, practise and perspective”. In the study, descriptive content analysis method has been used. The units have been evaluated in terms of cultural content and theme, then those themes are categorized according to those four subcategories. The number of themes under each category have been cross-sectionally compared. Most common cultural theme in A1 level is found to be product, practise, perspective and person from the highest to the lowest respectively. As for A2 level distribution of subcategories “person” was found to be highest then product. Perspective and practise at this level was found to be equally distributed and less than person and product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Humor in French as a Foreign Language Class: A case study with comics Since the emergence of the communicative and then task-based approach in foreign language teaching, humor has been left aside to the benefit of an “efficient” language perspective. This vision limits the language to a communication tool and forgets all the implicit and cultural weight any language act supposes, as has established Bougherra in 2007 by defending an “esthetical- ludic-referential competence”. This paper proposes to introduce humor in a French class for foreigners through a didactic activity field tested, easy to build and to adapt in different teaching contexts, operable from the beginner level to the advanced one. The project uses the website birdsdessines.fr, which publishes every day new comics created by any user and at the same time offers a very user- friendly content creation tool. Guiding the learners into it step by step, starting from understanding those comics and arriving at creating some new ones, will allow them to discover and understand different humor types, but also reproduce them. We will present three different educational uses based on this website, implemented in two Italian universities in groups going from the beginners to the B1 level. We will observe how the learners familiarize themselves with humor’s presence in their language path, understand its mechanism, and finally manipulate it themselves in the foreign language. Finally, we will verify that the learners have developed a true capacity for understanding and creating humor, but also that their relation to the learning process has been positively impacted, by analyzing the comics they produced. Since this project has been carried out on a small scale, we intend to inspire foreign language teachers to reproduce it and hopefully confirm our results. Thus, we aim to demonstrate how it is possible and beneficial to expand the existing pedagogical approaches by including a true “humor competence”, as defined by Harakchiyska and Borisova as a transversal capacity to understand, react to and produce jokes. ________________________________________________ Résumé Depuis l’avènement des approches communicatives et actionnelles dans l’enseignement des langues étrangères, l'humour a été laissé de côté au profit d’une vision “efficace” de la langue. Cet article se propose de l’introduire en classe de FLE à travers une activité didactique, simple à mettre en place et à adapter à des contextes d’enseignement différents, et ce dès le niveau débutant. Grâce au site birdsdessines.fr, qui publie quotidiennement des bandes dessinées créées par les utilisateurs inscrits et met à disposition un outil de création très facile à prendre en main, les apprenants peuvent découvrir et comprendre différents types d’humour, mais aussi chercher à les reproduire ou à en créer d’autres. Nous présenterons donc trois exploitations pédagogiques différentes basées sur ce site, mises en œuvre dans deux universités italiennes auprès de groupes allant du niveau débutant complet au B1. Ces exploitations permettent d’habituer progressivement les apprenants à la présence du comique dans leur parcours linguistique, de leur en faire comprendre les mécanismes, et de les conduire à le manipuler eux-mêmes en langue étrangère. Nous constaterons au terme de ces parcours que les apprenants développent non seulement une réelle capacité de compréhension et de production de l’humour dans la langue étrangère, mais aussi que leur rapport à l’apprentissage de la langue en est affecté positivement. Nous invitons ainsi les enseignants de FLE à s’inspirer de ces séquences et espérons montrer comment il est possible et souhaitable d’élargir les approches pédagogiques actuelles pour y intégrer une véritable “compétence humoristique”. Mots clés: Français Langue Étrangère ; Bande dessinée ; BirdsDessinés ; Rire ; Efficacité pédagogique ; Enseignement des langues ; Humoristique

Reading is an important element of independent work on the language, but offering students additional reading to improve their linguistic and cultural competences is an extremely difficult task, due to the evolving tastes of young people and the variability of the media they use. Given the popularity of manga and digital comics in France, Romance philology students were asked to read a series selected from the webtoons.com/fr platform in French. A survey was then carried out to find out their views on how this tool could be used in French language learning. The results of the survey clearly indicate that the webtoons.com/fr platform can be used as an effective tool for learning French. According to the respondents, reading the selected series allowed them, above all, to develop lexical resources and was also an enjoyable pastime that increased motivation to learn the language. Students also paid attention to the combination of word and image, appreciating both the aesthetic and practical side of reading digital comics. Finally, the practicality of using the platform, its ease of use and accessibility was emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many didacticians (cf. Naturel 1995; Cuq et Gruca 2005; Riquois 2019; Fiévet 2013; Defays et al. 2014; Godard 2015) are of the opinion that literary texts have the potential to develop not only linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic competences, but also intellectual competences of the learners thanks to the migration of imagination that is created by their reading experience. In French as a foreign language textbooks, which are primarily based on communicative competence, reading of literary texts have often been marginalized. This article reflects on the question of whether teachers of French as a foreign language at Czech eight-year grammar schools perceive literary texts as a tool for the development of socio-cultural contexts and for the overall improvement of the key skills of their learners. The present text proposes an interpretation of the results of the questionnaire that took place in March and April 2022, as well as a reflection on the role of reading literary texts in French as a foreign language classrooms from the perspective of teachers.

Study of Intralinguistic Interference in FLE: The Impact of Homographs and Pronouns on the Learning of Complements and Definite Articles at Osun State University-Nigeria Linguistic interference is a psycholinguistic phenomenon which slows down the learning process of the target language due to the existing similarities between it (L2) and the one already acquired (L1). Many research works had been carried out on linguistic transfer and interference. However, among those works, only a significant few have underscored the intra-linguistic interference as a trap associated with understanding the homographs, personal pronoun complements and definite articles in the class of French as a foreign language FLE. Therefore, this paper evaluates the grammatical implications that the distinctions between le, la, la les as personal pronoun complements and definite articles in Allah n’est pas obligé by Ahmadou Kourouma have on Anglophone French learners. The theoretical framework adopted to foreground our claims is linguistic transfer and interference. Percentage (%) is the scale used to interpret their performance while data are analysed based on textual analysis. The text is purposively selected to situate our analysis in the context of a postcolonial Francophone African literary text whose learning is always complicated among Anglophone and Yorubaphone French learners. Five questions were asked to evaluate the language skills of the seventy-five (75) third-year students at Osun State University across twenty corpora drawn from the work. The morpho-phonetic similarities between the definite articles and the personal pronoun complement inhibit the comprehension of instructional materials. In conclusion, contextual interpretation and more rigorous study of the grammatical subject matters are suggested to both teachers and learners, respectively, to eliminate the confusion associated with the teaching and learning of the homographs. To significantly improve academic performance among non-French-speaking learners, authorities should implement the pragmatic interventions outlined in this article, involving teaching professionals and learners alike.

It has been suggested that Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) positively affects learners’ content-related vocabulary. While CLIL has become increasingly popular throughout Spain, the language of instruction in this learning environment has predominantly been English, largely to the neglect of other languages. Calls have consequently been made to conduct comparative research across other languages to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of CLIL irrespective of the language of instruction. In addition, female learners have been found to outperform males in areas of vocabulary such as lexical availability (LA) in English. However, given suggestions that CLIL may blur gender differences, it is unclear whether this difference is also found in a multilingual CLIL context. This study thus aims to determine whether an English advantage is observed in LA in a multilingual CLIL environment, and whether this advantage varies in male and female learners. Results indicate that there is a clear dominance in English over French, regardless of gender. However, analysis across different grades reveals that CLIL instruction has a clear effect on the students’ LA in different languages, but in different ways for male and female learners. The findings are of key importance to CLIL stakeholders wishing to support male and female learners in multilingual classrooms.

in light of the discontinuity between the objectives assigned by language policies in Greece and their implementation in the teaching of French as a foreign language in public schools, this article will consider, from the point of view of the teacher of French as a foreign language, the in-between stance as a possible way of giving another meaning to difference and to teaching to facilitate learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica is the property of Universidad de la Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores two under-researched types of corpora for use in data-driven learning (DDL): L2 corpora (i.e. in a second or foreign language) and multimodal corpora. It first outlines the development of FLEURON, a dedicated DDL platform designed to support interactional competence in French as a Foreign Language (FFL), based on multimodal corpora of both native and L2 speakers. It then presents an ecological study of how 19 international FFL learners interacted with the platform in a DDL approach at the University of Lorraine. The analysis highlights how L2 corpora in particular can help learners to improve their awareness of complex phenomena related to conversational narratives by engaging their meta-cognitive strategies during their time abroad. The study thus reveals the potential for integrating an L2 component among the range of resources available for teaching and learning spoken interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth literature allows for the exploration of linguistic and cultural elements, guiding learners to develop their oral interaction skills and critical thinking in the face of sensitive topics such as coexistence, differences, tolerance, xenophobia, and racism. The UNESCO (2010) considers the learning of living together as a fundamental educational mission. Starting from the premise that these values can be embraced by educational systems, this paper examines the effect of storytelling on the development of language and social skills among French as a foreign language learners. The researchers focus on middle school students who are learning French as a foreign language, aiming to address the following question: To what extent does storytelling facilitate the advancement of language acquisition as well as socialization and coexistence skills among the target group? Approaching this, the French textbook designed for middle school students in Algeria is examined, revealing the motives behind the various selections found in the book in order to support our argument. A total of 23 students were given a pre-test to evaluate their level of socialization. After completing three storytelling sessions, a post-test was conducted to assess student's level of socialization. The findings indicate that examining narratives that focus on various social and civic principles is crucial since they affect students' perspectives. The fact that underlines storytelling's role in enhancing students' ability to coexist harmoniously. The results reveal that the study of narratives conveying various social and civic values had a significant impact on the observed students' perceptions. By exploring tales that convey these values, we observed noticeable changes in how students grasp the concepts of respect, responsibility, and cooperation within the educational and social community.

The present study aims to measure the effects of the teaching of second language (L2) phonological forms on L2 receptive vocabulary learning. Two teaching methods were compared in a pre- and delayed post-test to evaluate their impact on L2 word learning. Participants (n = 127; mean age = 12;6, i.e. 12 years and 6 months) were randomly divided in two groups that followed either an explicit teaching method focused on L2 phonological forms, or a communicative teaching method focused on meaning, in which L2 phonological forms were taught implicitly. The teaching methods in the two groups aimed to foster the skills and the learning of phonological forms involved in the development of receptive vocabulary. The two teaching methods trained the same skills and relied on the same vocabulary. They both targeted the phonological forms of two difficult phonemic contrasts in French as a foreign language. The two teaching sequences took place during mandatory lessons in French as a foreign language for six weeks (12 lessons), in a Swiss state school. Generalized mixed models were fitted to the data to test for differences across teaching methods in their impact on L2 word learning. Overall, the results indicate that participants made significant progress in word learning, with no significant differences between the two teaching methods. Pronunciation, discrimination, retention in verbal working memory, and the mastery of phoneme–grapheme correspondences are significant factors of vocabulary learning in French as foreign language. The teaching of L2 phonological representations and the training of their processing facilitated the learning of words in L2 French. However, the teaching of vocabulary in French as a foreign language rarely involves a focus on phonological representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth literature allows for the exploration of linguistic and cultural elements, guiding learners to develop their oral interaction skills and critical thinking in the face of sensitive topics such as coexistence, differences, tolerance, xenophobia, and racism. The UNESCO (2010) considers the learning of living together as a fundamental educational mission. Starting from the premise that these values can be embraced by educational systems, this paper examines the effect of storytelling on the development of language and social skills among French as a foreign language learners. The researchers focus on middle school students who are learning French as a foreign language, aiming to address the following question: To what extent does storytelling facilitate the advancement of language acquisition as well as socialization and coexistence skills among the target group? Approaching this, the French textbook designed for middle school students in Algeria is examined, revealing the motives behind the various selections found in the book in order to support our argument. A total of 23 students were given a pre-test to evaluate their level of socialization. After completing three storytelling sessions, a post-test was conducted to assess student's level of socialization. The findings indicate that examining narratives that focus on various social and civic principles is crucial since they affect students' perspectives. The fact that underlines storytelling's role in enhancing students' ability to coexist harmoniously. The results reveal that the study of narratives conveying various social and civic values had a significant impact on the observed students' perceptions. By exploring tales that convey these values, we observed noticeable changes in how students grasp the concepts of respect, responsibility, and cooperation within the educational and social community., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2024 The Authors.)