Papers by Émeline Gabard
Traduction Et Langues, 23(2) , 2024
Since the emergence of the communicative and then task-based approach in foreign language teachin... more Since the emergence of the communicative and then task-based approach in foreign language teaching, humor has been left aside to the benefit of an "efficient" language perspective. This vision limits the language to a communication tool and forgets all the implicit and cultural weight any language act supposes, as has established Bougherra in 2007 by defending an "estheticalludic-referential competence". This paper proposes to introduce humor in a French class for foreigners through a didactic activity field tested, easy to build and to adapt in different teaching contexts, operable from the beginner level to the advanced one. The project uses the website birdsdessines.fr, which publishes every day new comics created by any user and at the same time offers a very userfriendly content creation tool. Guiding the learners into it step by step, starting from understanding those comics and arriving at creating some new ones, will allow them to discover and understand different humor types, but also reproduce them. We will present three different educational uses based on this website, implemented in two Italian universities in groups going from the beginners to the B1 level. We will observe how the learners familiarize themselves with humor's presence in their language path, understand its mechanism, and finally manipulate it themselves in the foreign language. Finally, we will verify that the learners have developed a true capacity for understanding and creating humor, but also that their relation to the learning process has been positively impacted, by analyzing the comics they produced. Since this project has been carried out on a small scale, we intend to inspire foreign language teachers to reproduce it and hopefully confirm our results. Thus, we aim to demonstrate how it is possible and beneficial to expand the existing pedagogical approaches by including a true "humor competence", as defined by Harakchiyska and Borisova as a transversal capacity to understand, react to and produce jokes.
Uploads
Papers by Émeline Gabard