The status of spoken language in teaching-learning of foreign languages

Abstract

On the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Course in General Linguistics, the principle  that  languages  “have  a  primary  and  normal  manifestation  which  is phonic”  (Alarcos)  has  achieved  an  axiomatic  value  in Linguistics.  Given  that Didactics  of  Languages  has  traditionally  maintained subordinate  relations  with Linguistics, one might think that this same principle has been adopted in language teaching-learning, and that orality teaching does not represent an issue anymore.

However,  the  treatment  given  to  the  phonic  material  in  foreign  language teaching-learning and the notion itself of spoken language on which these approaches are founded reveal that, at best, "orality" is often reduced and limited to the phonic flow  and/or  to  the  activity  of  the  vocal  tract  which is  supposed  to  produce  it. Teaching  intervention  turns  out  to  be  based  on  physicalist  descriptions  (acoustic and/or  articulatory)  of  these  phonic  speech  performances which  is  particularly reductive and biased in didactic perspective.

A wide range of phenomena such as phonic variability, rhythm, metaphony, macromotorics,  sentence  modalities  or  proprioception  among  others  prove however  that  articulatory  or  acoustic  performances  are  created  in  the  process  of “dire” (saying) even before they are produced and before the phonological structuration of the phonic flow is accomplished by the audio-phonatory activity: The process of speech begins in the pre-linguistic phase and takes places in the “Logic of Life”. As pedagogical intervention can only be efficient if it is carried out at this stage, the “valeurs de la langue parlée” (spoken language values) enable us to characterize this process in order to establish didactic procedures. From  that  perspective,  and  obviously  provided  it  is  used  to  settle  and complete the process of structuration and memorization of the phonic material and not to initiate this process, writing, conceived as a symbolic representation of "orality", not as an analogical image, constitutes a means “we cannot simply disregard” (dixit Saussure), to represent speech and to make more efficient didactic intervention and internalize the language efficiently.