Entering into Language and into Languages: from the Mother Tongue to the (M)other Tongue
Résumé
This study begins with an observation based on thirty years of teaching English linguistics in higher education. 1 For many students, learning to speak English, and especially mastering the phonetics of English, is a fairly smooth process; for others, however, it is highly challenging or almost impossible, to the extent that some students abandon the prospect of becoming English teachers, even though that was what they initially set out to do. Poor marks given for oral exams as undergraduates, which can be levelled out by written assignments, leave almost no hope of success when attributed for spoken English in French schoolteachers' competitive exams (the English CAPES and agrégation). 2 While the majority of native Anglophones no longer speak phonologically standard English, it is nevertheless this variety of English that persistsor 'insists', to borrow a term from linguistics philosopher Jean-Jacques Lecercle 3at least in the French system, which values it very highly. Confronted with the variable results of traditional approaches to remediating these difficulties (e.g., long stays in English-speaking countries, intensive listening to programmes in English, all-English experiences of various kinds based on the idea of immersion and presumed to guarantee significant progress), I began to wonder whether they might be rooted in something other than, for some students, an always too brief exposure to the sounds of English. Might it not be worth studying how children learn to speak, in order to observe * To my student Miriam, whose mother does not speak French. To all the students whose mothers do not speak their (M)other tongue.
Domaines
LinguistiqueOrigine | Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte |
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