Double alienation
on April 7, 2008
in gv
When we work with a course book and we decide to put the language over in a certain order, we place the learners in a situation of double alienation:
(a) this is not their language (not their mother tongue)
(b) this is not what they want to express (we ask them to re-use, with a greater or lesser degree of freedom, gobbits of language chosen by people from outside their group, that is to say the authors and readers who work for the publishers).
This double alienation impacts negatively on the participants’ motivation and on their ability to understand, retain and integrate the foreign language. It also impacts negatively on the way the people learning the language relate to each other.
In traditional methodological terms, the “transfer” phase of the lesson which is meant to allow the learners to freely re-use language previously presented in the course book, in practice often runs into trouble and imposes artificial constraints on the learners. The same can be said for techniques that present participants with language at the start of the lesson and then require them to re-use some of this language right away.
(Bernard Dufeu)
