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English translation of:
PUREN Christian, « Felix dubitation ! Incertitude et complexité en didactique des langues-
cultures », EDL. Études en Didactique des Langues, revue du LAIRDIL, Laboratoire Inter-
uiniversitaire de Recherche en Didactique LANSAD, IUT A - Toulouse III, N° 37
« L'incertitude / Uncertainty »), juin 2021, pp. 51-68.
French version available at https://www.christianpuren/mes-travaux/2022d/.
Felix dubitatio!
Uncertainty and complexity in didactics of languages and cultures
Christian PUREN
Professor Emeritus of the University of Saint-Etienne
https://www.christianpuren.com
"The future is called uncertainty."
Edgard Morin, Les sept savoirs nécessaires à l’éducation du futur (1999)
"The collapse of solid but misleading certainties [...]
becomes the very space of freedom."
Karl Jaspers, Introduction à la philosophie (1950)
Abstract
The complexity of the objects and processes that are constitutive of the didactics of
languages and cultures, as well as the diversity and heterogeneity of the learners,
structurally confront the teachers with complexity, and therefore with uncertainty.
This is the reason why most teachers have always implemented an empirical
eclecticism in their classrooms, instead of the necessarily simplifying coherence of all
the constituted methodologies that their institutions often wanted to impose on
them. It is for the same reason that the discipline, when it finally took this complexity
into account, had to add to its first "methodological" perspective, first the "didactic"
(or meta-methodological) perspective in the early 1970s, and then the
"didactological" (or meta-didactic) perspective, from the early 1980s. This historical
evolution of the discipline came up against, and continues to come up against, three
forms of reductionism: theoretical, technological and practical applicationism; the
second, reactivated by the emergence of digital technologies, has recently been
reinforced by the intensive use of these technologies to ensure the so-called
"pedagogical continuity". The article proposes what the author calls, alluding to the
2
current pandemic, "some off-patent components of the anti-certainty vaccine":
teacher training in the epistemology of the discipline, "learner-centeredness" and the
"project approach". He concludes with the idea that since the language classroom is
a place and a time for collective learning in a complex environment, it can function
as an "incubator" for the skills now required in a professional world that is also
confronted with complexity and uncertainty.
Keywords: didactics of languages and cultures, uncertainty, complexity,
epistemology, history, eclecticism, applicationism.
Résumé
La complexité des objets et des processus constitutifs de la didactique des langues-
cultures ainsi que la diversité et l'hétérogénéité des apprenants confrontent
structurellement les enseignants à la complexité, et donc à l’incertitude. C’est la raison
pour laquelle la plupart des enseignants ont toujours mis en œuvre dans leurs classes
un éclectisme empirique, au lieu de la cohérence forcément simplificatrice de toutes
les méthodologies constituées que leurs institutions ont souvent voulu leur imposer.
C’est pour la même raison que la discipline, lorsqu'enfin à son tour elle a pris compte
cette complexité, a dû ajouter à sa perspective première, "méthodologique", d'abord
la perspective "didactique" (ou méta-méthodologique) au début des années 1970,
puis la perspective "didactologique" (ou méta-didactique), à partir du début des
années 1980. Cette évolution historique de la discipline s'est heurtée à l'époque, et
continue à se heurter actuellement, à ces trois formes de réductionnisme que sont les
applicationnismes théorique, technologique et pratique; le second, réactivé par
l’émergence des technologies numériques, s’étant trouvé récemment renforcé par
l'usage intensif de ces technologies pour assurer ladite "continuité pédagogique".
L'article propose ce que l'auteur appelle, faisant allusion à la pandémie actuelle,
"quelques composants hors-brevets du vaccin anti-certitudes": une formation des
enseignants à l'épistémologie de la discipline, la "centration sur l'apprenant" et la
"démarche de projet". Il conclut sur cette idée que la classe de langue étant un lieu et
un temps d'apprentissage collectif en milieu complexe, elle est en mesure de
fonctionner comme un "incubateur" des compétences désormais exigées dans un
monde professionnel lui aussi confronté désormais à la complexité et à l'incertitude.
Mots-clés: didactique des langues-cultures, incertitude, complexité, épistémologie,
histoire, éclectisme, applicationnisme.
Introduction
As ecclesiastical Latin is probably not assiduously frequented by many readers
of Studies in Language didactics, I specify that "Felix dubitatio! "("Happy uncertainty!")
refers to the expression "Felix culpa! "which the Catholic liturgy has taken from a
writing by St. Augustine.
The two exergues chosen for this article together echo, in the secular domain,
this idea of an evil producing a greater good: uncertainty is an inherent weakness of
3
human knowledge (Edgar Morin), but it is welcome because it is what allows us to
be free (Karl Jaspers). It is indeed to the extent that the future is uncertain that we
can at least partly write it ourselves; if it were entirely predictable, we would be totally
predetermined.
Transposed to the didactics of languages and cultures (DLC), the idea is that
our freedom in the conduct of the teaching process is commensurate with our
uncertainties about the functioning of the learning processes: if the learning
processes could be entirely predefined in a scientific manner, if there were a "(truly)
scientific didactics", we as teachers would have no room for personal manoeuvre...
and neither would our learners. All constituted methodologies, Galisson (1982: 67)
remarked, tend to function in language teaching as "systems for constructing
certainties and servitudes". Felix dubitatio! that Roux, (1994: 9) a Spanish teacher,
celebrated in an issue of Modern Languages devoted to ethics:
[...] this is probably the fundamental reason why I love this profession: it is precisely
insofar as there are no ready-made answers, no infallible recipes, no technical or
psycho-technical solutions, that the profession of educator keeps an ethical dimension.
[...]
This is why our profession implies a real freedom and why we can never claim it
enough. That is why it gives us a real dignity...
Uncertainty and complexity in science
The editors of Studies in Language Education chose to begin their call for papers
for this issue on "Uncertainty" with a reference to the "disruptive virus [that] has
called into question organization, planning, forecasting, projects, whether in the
cultural, political, economic or social fields". The reference is certainly relevant: many
viewers must have discovered with astonishment that medical science was not as
exact a science as they thought when they witnessed on live television the
disagreements between the various specialists and their uncertainties in the face of
the multiplicity, heterogeneity, variability and unpredictability of the parameters,
which are moreover interrelated, to be taken into account in their forecasts. Since
March 2020, we have all witnessed a continuous public illustration of the ontological
link between complexity and uncertainty, which would have amply justified the
intervention of a few epistemologists in the midst of the incessant parade of
epidemiologists
1
.
Some of them would certainly have quoted Morin, who regularly recalls in his
work this link between complexity and uncertainty. In his Introduction to Complex
Thinking (1990: 91-92), he writes
We can say that what is complex is, on the one hand, a matter of the empirical world,
of uncertainty, of the incapacity to be certain of everything, to formulate a law, to
conceive an absolute order. On the other hand, it comes from something logical, that
is to say from the incapacity to avoid contradictions.
1
If necessary, one can follow a catch-up session by consulting the online blog maintained by
philosophy professors, entitled "Covid-19: ethical and epistemological issues. Carnet de recherche
du projet ANR Epancopi", https://epancopi.hypotheses.org.
4
Thus, for him, education in complex thinking implies a permanent
confrontation with uncertainty. One of his collaborative works is entitled Educating
for the Global Age. Complex Thinking as a Method of Learning in Human Error and Uncertainty
(Morin et al. , 2003).
In his 1990 book, he notes that progress in knowledge is progress in uncertainty
even in the so-called "exact" sciences, because they have discovered the complexity
of reality:
[...] we see today that there is a crisis of the simple explanation in the biological and
physical sciences: therefore, what seemed to be the non-scientific residues of the
human sciences, uncertainty, disorder, contradiction, plurality, complication, etc., is
today part of a general problematic of scientific knowledge (1990b: 165).
The discovery of "principles of uncertainty" due to this complexity of reality is
indeed at the very heart of the development of exact sciences during the XXe century:
This is the case in quantum mechanics with the physicist Werner Heisenberg (1927),
in mathematics with the logician Kurt Gödel (1931), in meteorology with the
mathematician Edward Lorenz (1963), or in economics with the cybernetician Heinz
von Foerster (1976), scientists on whom many epistemologists, most of whom had
a scientific background, were to build: Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Isabelle
Stenghers, Ilya Prigonine, Henri Atlan, Bernard D'Espagnat, etc.
Uncertainty and complexity of the discipline "didactics of languages-
cultures "
Language and culture educators have not waited for educational scientists to
integrate these reflections into their discipline. For example, all of the scientists and
epistemologists mentioned above are mentioned in my 1994 Essay on Eclecticism
(Puren, 1994e: 73-83:), in a chapter entitled "Epistemological Shifts in Contemporary
Science," three of whose ten subchapters dealt with uncertainty in the hard sciences.
The following chapter was entirely devoted to "The complex epistemology of Edgar
Morin" (83-92).
The thesis that I defended then, and which is still mine, is that the eclecticism
of teachers, which has been, as far as we can tell, massive and constant in France
since the end of the XIXe century, constitutes an immediate empirical response to
the uncertainty with which they are constantly confronted by the complexity of their
collective teaching project of an object that is itself complex, namely a foreign
language-culture: if they do not know exactly how to teach what and to whom, the
most immediately available strategy is to diversify their practices, so that each learner
can at least find something to do. This can even be considered an ethical principle.
I have thus defended the idea of a "structural link between eclecticism and ethics":
[...] in the absence of an overall methodological coherence (a constituted methodology
of the audiovisual or direct type), the application of which to all students was thought
to guarantee the best possible results for each one, the maximum variation in the
modes of teaching and learning proposed becomes a moral obligation, since it is
known that the choice and systematization of certain modes will automatically favour
some students and fatally disadvantage others (Puren, 1994b: 4).
5
The problem is that even this maximum variation in instructional modes may
still not be sufficient for the huge potential diversity of learning modes, and that
consideration must therefore be given to allowing learners to diversify their learning
modes themselves.
My reflections on the epistemology of DLC in my 1994 Essay on Eclecticism were
not solitary: they were situated within the framework of a historical evolution of the
discipline that had begun in the early 1970s in French as a foreign language (FLE),
and that I had presented in an article of the same year (Puren, 1994a).
1. Until the 1960s, the didactics of French as a foreign language, like the
didactics of foreign languages in schools in France, had remained at a
"methodological perspective": different problems were identified in language teaching -
the teaching of grammar, phonetics, lexis, reading texts, etc. - to which
methodological solutions were brought. - to which methodological solutions are
provided.
2. In the 1970s, the strong diversification of training courses, which attracted
teachers of French as a foreign language from all over the world working with very
different audiences, on very different objectives and in very different environments,
made it impossible to present universalist methodological proposals. As Debyser
(1975: 25), then director of one of the two major research centers in FLE, the BELC,
writes in the minutes of a round table on the subject
The discussion is dominated by the following themes: plurality of objectives due to the
diversity of needs and the multiplicity of "parties involved", resulting in a greater
complexity and, generally, heterogeneity characteristic of internships in France. [This
leads the roundtable to question the pedagogical value of the complexity and
heterogeneity of purposes that seem to characterize most internships in France.
The disciplinary response of the trainers to this methodological uncertainty then
consisted in moving to a "meta" perspective: when an object is perceived as too
complex to be mastered from the inside, the only possible strategy is to get out of it,
to put oneself "on the side"
2
, so as to be able to understand it globally from the
outside. This metamethodological perspective corresponds to the so-called
"didactic" perspective, the name that was proposed for the discipline in the early
1970s (and that has remained since) to oppose it to both "pedagogy" and "applied
linguistics". Neither pedagogical principles nor scientific descriptions of the language
object can indeed provide unique, certain and definitive solutions as to the modes of
teaching, because the methodology does not only depend on the reference models
or theories, but on the aims and objectives, on the environments (of which the actors,
in particular the learners and the teachers themselves, are part), on the available
materials, on the installed practices (i.Finally, the criteria and modalities of evaluation:
all these are fundamental but numerous and heterogeneous components of the
"disciplinary field" (cf. Puren 044) which is constituted at that time under the name
of "didactics of languages".
2
This is one of the primary meanings of the Greek prefix μετα.
6
We can observe in the last part of the last sentence of the following quotation
from Michel Dabène (1972: 10), then director of the other major research center in
FLE at the time, the CRÉDIF, how the emergence of "didactics" is linked to this
movement of complexification of the disciplinary problem:
We must stop considering language teaching as the application of anything. It is a
discipline like any other, which must define itself as such and as such also borrow from
other disciplines the insights it needs. It is up to the discipline to pose its own
problematic and not to linguistics to elaborate models which we then wonder how they
will be applied. It is in this perspective that one could speak of "language didactics", as
a specific discipline that takes into consideration the nature and the purpose of
language teaching and not only the nature and the functioning of language.
In the 1970s, EFL trainers thus became aware that there are no predefined
problems in methodology to which predetermined solutions can be provided, but only
problems with possible management methods that can only be plural, local, partial and
temporary
3
. A trainer working with teachers with different methodological needs -
and all of them are, and even each one of them as soon as they move from one group
to another, or even from one learner to another - has no a priori methodological
answer to impose, but only questioning tools and elements for constructing plural
methodological answers to propose. So that one of the "seven 'scientific' laws of
language-culture didactics" (Puren 078, title of this paper) is the following: "The
number of methodological certainties of a trainer is inversely proportional to his level
of didactic training. "
3. The evolution of FLE didactics continued very rapidly in the following
years, no doubt due to the joint process of universitarization and internationalization
of its training, to such an extent that, from the beginning of the 1980s, a new shift to
the "meta" occurred; this time, therefore, to a "metadidactic" perspective. Galisson
(1986: 108) was the first to name this perspective, proposing to call it
"didactological", in an article in which he promoted "a 'didactology of
languages/cultures' which reflects on itself and takes charge of the elaboration of its
own theoretical models". The confrontation of FLE didacticians with the history of
their discipline, with didacticians from other countries and very quickly from
different languages, leads them this time to question the complexity of the didactic
field itself, and to rediscover uncertainty: it is didactics itself that, this time, is
perceived as a problematic. I have noted, in an article entitled "La didactique des
langues-cultures étrangères entre méthodologie et didactologie" (1999h), how issues
on metadata themes appeared at the end of the 1980s-beginning of the 1990s, in the
university journal of reference for FLE researchers at the time, Études de Linguistique
Appliquée
4
, issues on metadidactic themes such as "ideology" (1985, n° 60), "linguistic
3
On the epistemological difference between "problem" and "problematic" (Puren 023).
4
Very badly named from now on, therefore. Its director, Robert Galisson, had renamed it ÉLA
Revue de didactique-didactologie des langues-cultures.
7
policies" (1987, n° 65), "research training" (1994, n° 95)
5
, "curricular issues" (1995,
n° 98), and finally epistemology, with an issue (1997, n° 105) on "the concept in
foreign language didactics". It is therefore this last theme, epistemology, which has
been the driving force behind the evolution of the discipline and which, once it has
reached maturity, has led to the question of its relationship to knowledge.
The historical journey I've just traced above is not an exercise in scholarship,
because this past is still relevant in DLC for three strong reasons.
1. This succession of the three constituent perspectives of DLC provides a
logical principle of progression in initial academic training in this discipline, because
it takes students through the different historical phases through which the discipline
itself has progressively formed. Other disciplines have long applied this principle of
homology, such as philosophy and law
6
. I proposed an implementation of it,
following a seminar in July-August 2010 at the Centro de Estudios de Lenguas
Extranjeras (CELE) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in a
document entitled "Arquitectura general de una formación universitaria a la didáctica
de las lenguas-culturas" (2010a-es, French version revised and expanded 2010a). In
this progression, in fact, each perspective provides some new knowledge, but the next
one (including the indispensable reflexive returns 3➔ 1➔ 2: see point 2 below)
comes to "problematize" them, in other words to prevent them from becoming
certainties.
I have proposed a similar type of progression, through progressive complexity,
in a particular domain of initial university education, that of concepts (2001a: 6-9).
In the first stage (up to the Bachelor's degree), disciplinary concepts are "concept-
products", i.e. students must appropriate standard concepts as they are presented to
them. In a second phase (in the master's program), they are "process-concepts",
because students must then problematize them in order to adapt them to their first
personal research and link them together in their own conceptual framework. In a
third phase, if they become university researchers, they will be partly "constructed-
concepts", which they will have had to elaborate themselves for the needs of their
research: a thesis is thus evaluated in particular according to the "conceptual gains"
that it brings to the discipline. These concepts-constructed by each professional
researcher function in the continuation of his research as his own concepts-products,
and the complex mechanics of recursivity continues in this way, in a movement of
construction-deconstruction-reconstruction that is distressing because it is uncertain:
5
As editor in chief of the APLV journal, Les Langues modernes, I had also launched and directed in
1994 an issue devoted to ethics in language didactics. All the articles of this issue are available on
the Gallica site of the Bibliothèque nationale de France:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9691027q.
6
In a book chapter entitled "The Architecture of Complexity", Herbert A. Simon (1962) considers
this principle of disciplinary formation as a way of managing the complexity of the knowledge to
be transmitted: "[...] one can expect ontogeny to partially recapitulate phylogeny, [and this] has
applications outside the field of biology. It can be applied as easily, for example, to the transmission
of knowledge in the educational process. In most subjects, especially in the rapidly progressing
sciences, the transition from elementary to advanced courses is, to a large extent, a passage through
the conceptual history of the science itself" (481).
8
to have the feeling, at the beginning of each research, that one's competence as a
researcher is entirely at stake is a sign of professionalism, and an indication that it is
going to be a real research.
2. The three disciplinary perspectives - methodological, didactical and
didactological - must be constantly integrated in the recursive or ("dialogical") logic
characteristic of complex thinking, i.e. they must be used to constantly problematize
each other.
It is the constant linking of these three perspectives that characterizes what I
have called, since the late 1990s, the "complex didactics of language-cultures"
7
. As
Morin wrote in his Introduction to complex thinking (1990a: 67):
Complex epistemology [...] is the place of both uncertainty and dialogue. Indeed, all
the uncertainties [...] must confront each other, correct each other, inter-dialogue
without, however, hoping to plug the ultimate breach with ideological plaster. (1990a,
p. 67)
3. Progress in DLC, like that of the exact sciences, as Morin says, is progress in
uncertainty, at the rate of the complexity of its problems
8
. The reminder and
illustration of this fundamental fact of its history is an indispensable instrument in
the fight against a natural tendency of teachers to seek reassuring certainties, of
trainers and inspectors to establish their power by imposing limiting norms, and of
researchers to specialize in partial theoretical approaches that are all the more
comfortable because they avoid confronting the limits imposed on knowledge by the
empirical complexity of the field.
The reduction of uncertainty is indispensable in the daily practice of teachers,
who use various rational means for this purpose: course preparations, textbooks and
more or less personal methodological models, etc., but also institutional guidelines
or particular proposals from trainers or didacticians.
9
However, this rationality is
constantly at risk of being misinterpreted. But this rationality is constantly in danger
of degrading into rationalization and thus legitimizing limited practices whose
fossilization it will be difficult to avoid. In chapter 1.3, "Les erreurs de la raison"
(pp. 7-8) of his book Les sept savoirs nécessaires à l'éducation du futur (1999), Morin returns
to one of the most recurrent themes in his work, namely the opposition between
"closed rationalization", that of exclusive and totalizing theories, dogmas, doctrines
7
See e.g. 1998b and my manifesto article 2003b.
8
For some examples of this progress in uncertainty, cf. Puren 1997d, with two postfaces, "Ten
Years Later..." (Sept. 2008) and "Twenty Years Later" (Nov. 2018), each of which adds new
contemporary examples.
9
I have presented some of these means in the article "Ways of managing complexity" (1994d: 7-
13).
9
and paradigms, and "open rationality", conscious of the complexity of reality and the
limits of knowledge. He draws the following conclusion that some didactic specialists
in linguistics, sociolinguistics and other cognitive sciences would be wise to ponder:
Hence the need to recognize in the education of the future a principle of rational
uncertainty: rationality risks ceaselessly, if it does not maintain its self-critical vigilance,
to fall into the rationalizing illusion. This means that true rationality is not only
theoretical, not only critical, but also self-critical (8).
Morin would probably not object to replacing "the education of the future" in
this passage with "the training of the future". Beginning trainee teachers often have
contradictory relationships, which they sometimes experience very badly, with their
trainers, from whom they ask for certainty and clear and defined directions, while at
the same time they feel that this would be insufficient, or even counterproductive, to
manage the complexity of their classroom practices. Hence the two opposing
criticisms they make of them, of being incompetent or, conversely, of taking power
over them by withholding their knowledge.
In the history of DLC, as in its actuality, rationalization always takes the form
of applicationism.
Obsession with certainties and reductive applications
"The heart of complexity" writes Morin (1990a: 43) "is the impossibility of
homogenizing and reducing [...]". Yet this is exactly the epistemological project of all
applicationism. Throughout the history of DLC, the dominant forms of
applicationism have been different, and we find them all in the present day,
sometimes combined together.
Methodological applicationism
Historically, it is the great generalist methodologies - the traditional grammar-
translation, direct, active and audiovisual methodologies, the communicative approach
- that have been the first means of homogenization and thus of reducing the diversity
of practices: until the 1990s, at least, training language teachers in classroom practices
consisted in training them in the dominant methodology in force
10
. However, as a
global coherence, no methodology allows for the correct management of complexity,
which explains, if not justifies, the widespread eclectic practices among teachers. All
methodologies, moreover, were initially developed according to certain determining
parameters, in particular the objectives targeted (e.g. reading or oral communication
skills), the audiences (children, young people or adults), the teaching environments
(total number of hours, more or less intensive or extensive teaching, number of
learners per group, materials used, etc.), as well as the beginnings of the learning
process. Among the internal drivers of methodological evolution in the course of
history are precisely the difficulties and impasses that methodologies have faced
when their promoters have wanted to extend their application for teaching advanced
10
On the references to the history of methodologies that I will make in the remainder of this text,
I refer to my 1988 book(a).
10
learners, and/or when they have wanted to extend it to other settings: all
methodologies can only be, literally, "victims of their success".
Specialized methodologies, those known as "on specific objectives" (FOS,
French for Specific Purposes, ESP, English for Specific Purposes, etc.) can all the more
avoid these impasses and difficulties since they are generally short courses. But they
do not allow for a better management of complexity, which is identical whatever the
degree of specialization of the contents and the modes of teaching. To illustrate this
property of complexity, epistemologists often take the example of fractals, in which
the whole picture is found in the smallest detail. It is this same property that has led
to the fact that, after "language didactics", we could no longer speak of the
"methodology of grammar/lexicon teaching...", but of the "didactics of
grammar/lexicon...".
Theoretical applicationism
The great wave of theoretical applicationism arrived in France in the 1960s,
following the emergence in the USA of the audio-oral methodology, whose
promoters thought they had found "the key" to scientific language teaching in the
combination of distributional linguistics and behaviourist psychology, implemented
in particular in structural exercises. We have seen above (cf. Michel Dabène's
quotation) that the discipline "didactics of languages" was constituted at the very
beginning of the 1970s by claiming its autonomy with respect to external theories.
But the need for certainty among teachers and for academic recognition among
university didacticians is so strong that the approach that can be called "scientistic"
of the problem of language teaching-learning has been maintained until today.
This is very clearly seen, for example, in the authors of the CEFR (COE, 2001),
who justify their refusal to take a position on methodological questions on the pretext
that linguistics (87 and 89), cognitive sciences (108-109) and "theories relating to
language competence" (23) do not yet provide "to date", "at present", "currently"
scientific certainties
11
. These uncertainties would explain
12
, in the eyes of these
authors, the eclecticism of teachers, which is cited only once in the document, at the
end of the passage below:
6.2.2.2 Others believe that in addition to exposure to comprehensible input, active
participation in communicative interaction is a necessary and sufficient condition for
language development. They, too, consider that explicit teaching or study of the language is
irrelevant. At the other extreme, some believe that students who have learnt the necessary
rules of grammar and learnt a vocabulary will be able to understand and use the language in
the light of their previous experience and common sense without any need to rehearse.
Between these polar extremes, most ‘mainstream’ learners, teachers and their support
services will follow more eclectic practices, […] (COE 2001: 140)
11
Full citations of these passages and their detailed analysis can be found in my joint work with
Bruno Maurer on the CEFR (COE 2001) and its Companion volume (COE 2018): Maurer &
Puren, 2019: 49-54.
12
Or "justify"? The statement is probably deliberately ambiguous.
11
In this regard, I would like to repeat my following comment, which is perfectly
suited to the theme of my present article.
The authors state several times in their text that "the Framework is not intended to
promote a particular teaching method but to present choices. "But they adopt this
position only because of their impossibility of imposing their expertise on the basis of
scientific certainties: not out of democratic principle, therefore, contrary to what they
claim [cf. the 2nd paragraph of extract 2 above], and even less because they are
convinced that methods must be plural. They have in fact remained with a scientistic
conception of knowledge, which leads them to restrict the treatment of methodology,
in the absence of certainties, to the simple compilation of the available options, and
thus to overlook the only relevant, complex reflection, which concerns the contextual
rules of use of each of the available methods, with their advantages, their limits and
their possible disadvantages (2015f: 7-8, quoted in Maurer & Puren 2019: 52).
What the authors of the CEFR thus deny is nothing less than the legitimacy of
the didactic perspective, and thus of the discipline "didactics of languages and
cultures" itself, in the name of a scientism that postulates the primacy of theory over
practice. In the epistemology that is appropriate to DLC, we must consider, on the
contrary, as the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty (1995) does, that
theory is "an auxiliary of practice". Scientism in our discipline is, to use Morin's
formula quoted above, only an "ideological plaster" on the cognitive wounds that
uncertainty inflicts on some.
Technological applicationism
This applicationism is based on another, deterministic postulate, which is that
"new technologies" - these days mainly digital environments, the Web and artificial
intelligence - would in themselves produce an improvement in language learning. This
postulate is already latent in the American audio-oral methodology of the 1950s, the
prestige of structural exercises coming in part from the language laboratories. It is
found again, this time explicitly, in the French audiovisual methodology, whose
promoters emphasized the effectiveness of the combination - displayed in the very
name of the methodology - between the oral support provided by the tape recorder
and the visual support provided by the projector and the fixed film. It is unnecessary,
I think, to give here some current examples of the "techno-literary" discourse, so
prevalent is it, even though a consensus exists among didacticians of all disciplines,
as well as among specialists in educational sciences, on the postulate of
"convergence": a technological innovation can only produce lasting positive change
in teaching-learning if it meets a didactic innovation and, undoubtedly, if its use has
already become established in the daily lives of learners and teachers (Puren 2009e).
It is not at all certain, therefore, that any technological innovation will succeed in
improving the "ordinary practices" of a significant number of teachers (Puren
2016d).
Practical applicationism
It can be considered a variant of methodological applicationism, but unlike the
latter, it is not a set of practices determined by an overall coherence, but rather more
12
or less isolated and specific "good practices": it is therefore an even more reductive
approach to didactic complexity. One can also speak of a real "ideology of good
practices" originally based on the benchmarking technique in business management
and which has spread in many international organizations - even in the French
National Education - for all types and contents of training.
In 2006, the Council of the European Union published a document entitled
"Council Conclusions on the European Indicator of Language Competence"
13
in
which it asks the Member States to "establish, on the basis of the Common European
Framework of Reference for Languages [sic! . to validate language skills", in particular
because the data thus collected "will make it possible, through an increased exchange
of information and experience, to identify and exchange good practice in language
teaching policies and methods".
As I wrote in an article (2007a: 3):
I can imagine the reactions of my French colleagues who would be offered as models
the "good practices" of the teachers at the Lycée Louis Le Grand in Paris or La Bruyère
in Versailles on the pretext that their students' results in the European test would be
the best in France!... There are certainly good practices (without quotation marks) at
the Karl Marx College in Villejuif or Jean Moulin in Le Havre, but this is also because
they are adapted to their students, and therefore they have no more vocation than the
others to serve as models for the rest of France and the whole of Europe.
It is easy to understand why I appreciated Philippe Watrelot's denunciation of
the "four pitfalls of innovation", including the "managerial discourse", in the words
of the President of the National Innovation Council for Educational Success
(CNIRÉ):
Careful handling rather than management... The CNIRÉ wants us to avoid this trap of
overhanging discourse and managerial rhetoric about "good practices" and advocates
for "low-key" changes within the National Education (Watrelot, 2017).
This ideology of "good practices" is apparently shared by a good number of
teachers, even by those who are otherwise fiercely opposed to the introduction of
managerial logic into national education. Among the many colloquia and other study
days I have attended, some of them included public evaluations. The best scores were
generally obtained by presentations made by practitioners who had developed, or at
least experimented in their own classrooms, "innovative practices", with a discourse
that was sometimes more commercial than didactic. However, the success of a
particular methodological practice necessarily depends on multiple contextual
factors, starting with the learners and teachers themselves, so that another of the
"seven 'scientific laws' of language-culture didactics" (Puren 078) is: "The more
concrete it is, the less transferable it is"; in other words, the more uncertain the results
to be expected from such practices when they are reproduced by others in other
environments.
13
Official Journal of the European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri
=OJ:C:2006:172:0001:0003:EN:PDF.
13
The didactic perspective I presented above can be precisely defined, among
other things, as a mechanics of methodological abstraction similar to that which
Huberman & Miles (1991) propose to operate in their discipline from the primary
data provided by sociological observation. The abstraction process generates models
by eliminating contextual variations. The only thing that can be applied in DLC, in
fact, are neither practices nor theories, but "models" (Walliser, 1977 in Puren 014;
Rorty. 1995 in Puren 015; Puren 2020) that set the principles of action, among which
there is always a principle of uncertainty as to the modes of concrete implementation
on the ground.
Some off-patent components of the vaccine
A first inoculation component - it will come as no surprise that I am starting with
this one - is a training in DLC epistemology. Once injected, it generates as its main effects
a permanent recursivity between the three constituent perspectives of the discipline
and a critical watch against all forms of applicationism.
A second vaccine component is the so-called "learner-centeredness". Its requirement can
be criticized when it is presented, as it was for decades in DLC, in the mode of an
unrealistic exclusive injunction
14
. But when it is made to work "in the background",
"in the background of the (teaching) task", also in a critical watch mode, it protects
against the reduction of teaching modes by keeping present, in the teachers' minds,
the uncertainty concerning the learning modes really implemented by each learner.
The term "differentiated pedagogy", which implies that it is the teachers who
differentiate the teaching-learning process, is not used in northern European
countries because it is considered that the teacher cannot know in real time what is
appropriate for each of his or her students and that he or she could not, in any case,
differentiate his or her teaching methods sufficiently to the point where they would
be appropriate for all.
The French pedagogue André de Peretti, proposing an "Esquisse d'un
fondement théorique de la pédagogie différenciée" (1985, p. 5), appeals to the "law
of required variety" of William Ross Ashby, one of the founders of cybernetics,
which states that a system can only effectively pilot another system if it possesses a
degree of internal variety at least equal to that of this other system. Given the extreme
diversity of cognitive profiles as well as learning habits and strategies of learners in
group teaching, it is surprising that De Peretti did not question, despite this
theoretical reference, the very idea of differentiated pedagogy, since teachers cannot
have what he asks of them in his text, namely "a variety of pedagogical measures and
methods that are sufficiently developed". His proposed measure of freeing teachers
from any "standardized pedagogical framework that excludes or discourages diverse
forms of approach or method" (11) is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
In northern European countries, the expression used for managing the
heterogeneity of learners is open learning, offenes lernen. In other words, differentiation
14
In institutional group teaching, a teacher is necessarily led to focus at times on the group of
learners, at other times on the institutional requirements or even on his or her own teaching, and
all of these focuses may at times be in opposition to each other (cf. Puren 1995a).
14
is conceived as a differentiation of learning and not of teaching, with the learner
being considered the only one who knows at all times what is appropriate for him or
her and who can implement it. To this end, teachers organize sequences of
autonomous learning alongside directive teaching sequences
15
.
The link between uncertainty, complexity and a variant of methodological
eclecticism can be found in this passage from an article by Abe & Gremmo, two
members of the CRAPEL in Nancy (Centre de Recherches et d'Applications
Pédagogiques en Langues) which specialized, from the early 1970s, on the question
of the autonomy of students in the LANSAD sector in university language centers.
As we do not know what actually happens in the black box that is the human brain, it
is difficult to know what information to give at the beginning to be sure that it results
in a satisfactory output, and therefore intake. In fact, in a traditional course, the teacher
proposes a method to promote this acquisition or intake. But if the learner has a
different method than the one proposed, he will not be able to learn at all, or he will
spend a considerable amount of time trying to understand and acquire the method
proposed by the teacher.
It may be possible to solve the problem by offering a wide variety of methods. The
learner, by trial and error, is more likely to find the one that suits him. This is the
system that is offered in self-study: not only are the methods varied, but so are the
materials and the English-speaking [speakers]; only the advice is the fixed point of
learning. Learners generally choose to work on several documents and several methods
in parallel (1983: 113).
A third vaccine component is the project approach. It has been present since the
beginning of CRAPEL, with a formula containing the same two basic elements: for
the teacher, a teaching project aiming at the autonomy and responsibility of the
learners; for the latter, their own learning project.
The project approach is nowadays widespread at all levels and in all areas of
society: for example in scientific laboratories (cf. "research projects"), in companies
and administrations, in secondary schools (cf. "school projects"), in pedagogy (cf.
pedagogical projects"), for individuals (cf. "life projects" and "professional projects")
and, beyond that, for any type of collective social action, from that of a group of
neighbors (for an apéro project at the bottom of the building, for example) to that of
an entire nation (cf. the notion of "society project"). So much so that Jean-François
Boutinet was able to publish, in 1990, a book entitled Anthropologie du projet.
The fundamental reason for this universal diffusion of the project is that it is
the mode of conducting action that is best adapted to complex environments, i.e. to
contexts of uncertainty. To manage this complexity and the uncertainty it provokes,
the project approach relies on a set of specific cognitive operations that all aim to
anticipate, control, evaluate and, if necessary, rework each of the different tasks to
be carried out, or even remove or add new ones (cf. Puren 2017a). The current
actional perspective, because it aims at the formation of a social actor, has revived
the type of project suitable for teaching-learning, namely the so-called "pedagogical
15
On the need, in good complex management logic, to conceive of differentiated pedagogy and
autonomous learning as both opposing and complementary approaches, see Puren & Bertocchini
(2001).
15
project". Insofar as the pedagogical project is a complex social action, it confronts
learners collectively with methodological choices likely to lead them to mobilize the
different disciplinary perspectives themselves (Puren 053, 2022).
In conclusion
Even more than before, if learners and their teacher work together to this end
and act accordingly, the language classroom can function as a real "incubator" of
transversal competences, among which the so-called "tolerance of uncertainty", with
which language teaching-learning, as we have seen, confronts teachers and learners
in particular. I can think of no better way of concluding than to take up the
conclusion I proposed in an article entitled "The Epistemology of the didactics of
languages and cultures, a complex epistemology for a complex discipline" (2019).
The necessary complexity of teaching-learning practices in the language
classroom has strong similarities with that of professional life, so that the LANSAD
language teacher, if he/she organizes his/her teaching and asks his/her learners to
organize their learning accordingly, can claim to be a trainer in his/her own right, in
the same way as a teacher of Management in a Business School, of Urban Design in
a School of Architecture or of Product Design in a School of Graphic Design.
Exactly twenty years ago, during a conference at a UPLEGESS Congress in 1998, I
proposed that, for certain groups such as those involved in teaching languages for
specific purposes, collective learning of a foreign language should be seen as a kind
of "cultural gymnastics": the foreign language class is, in fact, a place and a time
where teachers can accompany, guide and help learners to train, in an environment
that is both demanding and benevolent, intensive and secure (as are the "business
incubators"), in cultural components that are particularly solicited in the professional
world, such as the taste for and the competence in collaborative work, the spirit of
initiative mastery of information, openness to difference and novelty, creativity,
collective debate, tolerance of uncertainty, mastery of different types and modes of
evaluation, the ability to benefit from one's own mistakes and those of others, and,
last but not least, the ability to manage complexity, in particular through a proactive
attitude, a reflective approach and mastery of project management.
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