The role of linguistics in the training of future french language teachers in the Czech Republic: educational objectives called into question
Abstrakt
Linguistics still plays a very important role in the university training of FLE teachers in the Czech Republic. We start from the principle that the teacher should above all be the specialist in the subject taught, the holder of linguistic knowledge. Students thus first acquire vast and complex linguistic knowledge to then be able (very often only during their teaching career) to choose carefully what is appropriate to transmit to students in primary or secondary schools. However, this preparation proves insufficient because in the school reality, the FLE teacher is mainly confronted with concrete classroom situations which require quite different skills, namely the diagnosis of the varied needs of the students, the management of the heterogeneous group, the organization of the learning process etc. This is why we find it essential that students in the educational sector learn early enough to analyze the relevance of linguistic content and then adapt them to the teaching context for which they are preparing, in other words the process of transposition didactics is an integral part of the linguistic subjects taught at university.
FLE teaching in the Czech Republic has long limited language teaching to the transposition of normative grammatical content in the language class. Even if in schools the communicative approach is quite widespread (especially thanks to French-speaking textbooks), the training of future teachers has not evolved much and is now being called into question by the czech Ministry of Education. Indeed we must react to a major current concern: the lack of motivation of students to learn a second foreign language, the teaching of which is strongly threatened and devalued in Czech society for its alleged uselessness and ineffectiveness. The second challenge emanating from the previous problem is therefore the question of the educational objectives of foreign and second languages in the current context. How can we transmit an interest in French to students and what is the role of linguistics in this process? We are convinced that linguistics should be put at the service of critical thinking, particularly in reflection on the logic of language and its illocutionary force.