Spare me the ‘lecteur’ – Part 2

If you joined me in my last post for my introduction to lecteur-ing, you’ll be aware that I promised to talk today about the specific modules that I taught at the ENS. A caveat: I certainly don’t claim to be an expert in English language teaching, nor was I the most effective at this task among my colleagues at the ENS. It’s important to acknowledge at this point that I was in the fortunate (in my case) position of teaching students who possessed a fair amount of cultural and social capital, and for whom the idea of ‘civilisation’ wasn’t synonymous with the erasure of their own history. While my students shared broadly liberal views on subjects such as immigration – there’s a reason that the Guardian is the most commonly-cited text in the concours d’entrée aux grandes écoles – they hadn’t experienced the ugly undertones that characterise parts of British politics. For them, their backgrounds had opened doors for them, rather than closing them, and as such, I didn’t have to face many of the challenges that far more talented teachers than me often find themselves confronting. In terms of my own practice, I was surrounded by some fantastic colleagues who really turbocharged my thinking about pedagogy, and who also made excellent use of varied resources to bridge the culture-language divide.

In the introductory talk given to all new lecteurs and lectrices at the ENS, we were told that ‘la langue est un cible en soi, mais à partir d’un certain niveau, les élèves demandent du contenu’.^[1] This ‘content’ was one of the main differences between what I had been expecting to do at the ENS and what I actually ended up doing: my students possessed a natural curiosity concerning English civilisation, and many of them would have been happy simply with a series of lectures on a given topic. That, however, wasn’t my aim: I wanted to respect the first part of this advice, and set off with the aim of integrating language and culture. I settled on two topics for my modules, each of which I would teach twice over the year. To begin with the first course, I decided that it was to be based around modern British politics and society, with the constraint that it had to include a significant amount of debating (a request made by the direction [management] of the Centre de Langues). The title of the course summed this up well: I called it ‘Britain Today: Debates and Dialogues’. As my students found out in the first week,

This course has two main aims: firstly, to develop your cultural awareness by stimulating discussions on some of the major social and cultural issues in Britain in 2016; and secondly, to improve your confidence and skills in English speaking and listening by participating in debates based on these issues. Of course, this course remains first and foremost a course in language, and as such you should expect to be learning new vocabulary every week, both through a regular reading of texts and through participating in debates.

Hopefully, the link between language and culture should be fairly evident here: one reinforces the other, and both allow for easier and more effective integration into the ‘speech community’. If you’d like to browse the entire course handbook, I’d warmly invite you to do so here, but for those of you who would rather not trawl through PDFs, I’ll provide a brief overview here. The course was essentially conceived of as an introduction to the kind of issues that students may have heard about in the news, but never had the opportunity or training to investigate in as much depth as they would have liked to. As a consequence, the range of subjects covered was pretty ambitious, as I acknowledged from the start: week by week, we looked at the British political system; government surveillance; Britain’s relationship with the EU; immigration; schools and universities; ‘zero-hours contracts’; and the benefits system. Each of these subjects has a pretty clear link to a current debate, so there was no question of having to work too hard to persuade students of their ‘relevance’ (unlike with my medieval module, on which more next week). Instead, the actual challenge was more specific.

Language vs. content

The course that I was teaching was, first and foremost, a language course, not a series of lectures on what French calls civilisation. My students weren’t specialists, and as a consequence their English lessons with me were in fact the only English lessons that they would receive. I therefore – again, in a similar position to my medieval course – couldn’t merely seek to ‘impart knowledge’, as satisfying as some of my students may have found this. This divide between the ‘content’ (often ‘cultural’) and the ‘linguistic’ (a ‘tool’ to be used) has vexed both theorists and practitioners of language teaching over the years,^[2], and so I can’t claim to have found a single solution. As a general rule, however, my students responded best when I used the latter in service to the former. Teaching tuition fees, for instance, allowed students to explore the differences between the very tricky verbs ‘raise’ and ‘rise’ (one is transitive while the other is not); holding (properly-researched) debates on the topics forced students to think about structuring their ideas in English, and to move beyond the somewhat-tired ‘first / second / third’ argument that is a blight on EFL teachers everywhere.

My first course taught at the ENS, then, was something of a novel experience, but one that both my students and I found useful and very instructive. They also, thankfully, appear to have enjoyed it: at least, that’s what one student said. ‘Now,’ he told me, ‘I can continue the debates in the pub on Friday evenings.’

¹ ‘Language is a goal in itself, but from a certain level onwards, students demand content.’[↵]
² As may be expected, there is an extensive bibliography on this subject, from which I’ll provide some indications in my next post.[↵]