Authenticité et albums muets : Activités de fictionnalisation en classe de FLE

Abstract

This article explores the advantages of wordless picture books in the teaching of French as a foreign language, apprehended in their dimension as authentic documents and sources of authentic tasks. To put theoretical approaches into practice in a didactic approach, a model is created based on the three semiotic levels of meaning, taken up by Chandler (2021), the denotative, connotative, and mythological/ideological level. These are aligned with fictionalizing activities according to Lacelle and Langlade (2007). Thus, specific activities progress from factual observation to the creation of a personal fictional narrative, via deduction as well as emotional and subjective reactions. An experiment was set up with a group of young adults at advanced beginner level with the wordless picture book The Whale, the boy, and the sea in between by Persa Zacharias (2019). The result shows that working with a wordless picture book according to our approach is a process of authentication in the sense of van Lier (1996). During this process, the learner singularizes the fictional content through a subjective reading, in collaboration with the peers in an interpretative debate, and re-scenarizes the plot elements in an own fictional narrative.