Autobiography in the Language Classroom

Towards a Narrative Method: Using Life-Writing in Military Education

“…8 Consequently, rather than thinking about life-writing works as presenting exemplary models of behaviour for cadets to emulate, they can be usefully envisioned as cultural ' contact zones', as conceptualised by Mary Louise Pratt, in which unfamiliar perspectives and subject positions meet and 'grapple' with each other (1991: 34). This theoretical concept has been adopted in second language teaching pedagogy to explain how readers place themselves in the position of the other and how life-writing can be used to cultivate a space for this meeting (see, for example, Edwards & Hogarth (2017)). It follows that the contact zone is particularly interesting in the context of PME for its foregrounding of the tension between uniform responses and individual reactions.…”

“…Current NMA teaching stresses sociolinguistic competence -understood to be the intersection of practising the language and the sociocultural contexts in which it is practised -through tasks based on life-writing texts designed to draw the cadets' attention to general and profession-specific vocabulary as well as to the communication contexts in these texts. Learning the language and the cultures of the language are parallel processes (see also Edwards & Hogarth 2017).…”

Lire des textes littéraires hybrides puis écrire son texte en L2 : quelle place pour l’image et pour les « langues en réserve » de l’apprenant ?

“…Au sein du champ littéraire francophone, l'écriture autobiographique relatant l'exil et le voyage est un domaine particulièrement riche, déjà exploité en contexte universitaire australien dans le cadre de l'enseignement du français langue étrangère (Edwards & Hogarth, 2016 ;Crozet, 2014). Cependant, l'orientation didactique varie.…”