Phylogeny commands psychogenesis

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Jan 11, 2020·5 min read

n. 20 — Modèles linguistiques et cognitifs et didactique des langues

Coordonné par Louis Begioni et Philippe Séro-Guillaume

· Louis BEGIONI, Philippe SÉRO-GUILLAUME, Introduction

· Louis BEGIONI, Stefan GENCARAU, Les implications de la culture métalinguistique dans l’apprentissage des langues étrangères

· Philippe GENESTE, Aspect verbal, psychogénèse et enseignement du temps en français

· Philippe SÉRO-GUILLAUME, Nouvelles perspectives en didactique auprès des jeunes sourds

· Jacqueline PICOCHE, Bruno GERMAIN, Pour une nouvelle didactique du lexique français

· Jacques COULARDEAU, Phylogeny commands psychogenesis

· Jana ALTMANOVA, La créativité lexicale dans la didactique du FLE. Le décodage des hapax comme exercice de motivation dans l’apprentissage du vocabulaire

· Marie-Pierre ESCOUBAS BENVENISTE, L’apprentissage de la morphologie du nom et du verbe français par des italophones : un corpus de contextes pour l’expérimentation

· Stefania CAVAGNOLI, CLIL, approcci integrati e politiche linguistiche: ausili per una buona didattica plurilingue

· Francesca DRAGOTTO, Ponti di sconoscenza. Una riflessione sul ruolo dei linguaggi delle narrazioni (e delle competenze) nello spazio sociale e comunicativo contemporaneo

· Chiara DE ANGELIS, Oreste FLOQUET, Deux groupes de collégiens (Abidjan et Toulouse) face à deux questions sur la transitivité et l’intransitivité en français : recherches sur les connaissances implicites et explicites des adolescents

· Simona MUNARI, La traduzione d’autore nell’aula di FLE: implicazioni teoriche e una proposta didattica

· Et tout le reste est littérature…

o Alessandro PIPERNO, Notice biographique

o Alessandro PIPERNO, La lingua francese, amore e tormento

Phylogeny commands psychogenesis

Jacques COULARDEAU
Academia.edu, Researchgate.net, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Éditions La Dondaine dondaine@orange.fr

Résumé

Apprendre une langue étrangère restructure nécessairement l’apprentissage de la langue première par les enfants. Je vais d’abord étudier les étapes nécessaires pour une langue première. Le développement mental contribue à l’acquisition de la langue première et en bénéficie. Enseigner une deuxième langue à un enfant monolingue remet en question sa construction mentale de sa langue première et oblige l’enfant à restructurer son esprit jusqu’ici construit pour la langue première. Certains raccourcis pédagogiques peuvent produire des erreurs. Apprendre une langue seconde, c’est réactiver la phylogénie du langage, et en particulier des langues première et seconde, et cette phylogénie réactivée doit être investie dans la psychogenèse du langage, et en particulier des langues première et seconde.

1. Introduction

Learning a foreign language — at any age, though it is easier at a younger age, or if you have been exposed to a bilingual situation early in your life, or if you have total or partial command of a quality that many autistic, particularly Asperger autistic people have, the ability to learn a language (oral competence, and/or written competence, and/or systemic competence) in a question of days or at best a couple of weeks when in total immersion — is a repeat process of the learning of your first language, which is a repeat process too of how language as a system of systems has phylogenetically developed and evolved during the emergence of Homo Sapiens.

Of course, there are differences particularly differences attached to the particular characteristics of the first and second languages that are necessarily more or less different, but different, nevertheless. And then the learning process is only particular and individual depending on the personality of the learner and the particularities of his/her first and second languages.

In my line of approach, linguistic phylogeny is reproduced in the psychogenesis of any individual learning a first language (starting around the 24th week of his/her mother’s pregnancy), or a second language, or any language at all. I am speaking of natural languages of course because learning machine code, no matter how elaborate, is a purely rational, logical, even scientific learning process since everything in machine code has been devised artificially and logically, as some say, from simple to complex, but always with a sequential logic from one operation to the next. Machine code is Boolean in nature: each operation operates on the results of the previous operation. Changing the order of operations may change the result of the process. For the machine code user, there is little freedom, except to invent new operations. This is in full contradiction with natural languages.

For a natural language learner there are some “phylogenetic” elements that cannot be avoided, that are necessary to just reach linguistic competence in general, for any language, and then there are phylogenetic elements that are attached to the system of systems one particular language is and whose order is functionally unavoidable. But there are also some ordering and some logical dynamic that can be negated, taken upside down in a psychogenetic procedure as compared to the phylogenetic order of language in general and one particular language specifically. Can such pedagogical reversal of phylogeny be accepted?

I will thus start with phylogeny to move to psychogenetics. The main objective is to show crucial choices have to be done and that they depend on the first language as reciprocally compared to the second language. Teaching English cannot be the same for an Indo-European or Indo-Aryan language speaker, or for an agglutinative language speaker, or for an isolating language speaker, or for a root language speaker. If you want your teaching to be effective the second language has to find links and connections in an already acquired first language, hence in language competence as a whole. The links can be unconscious or unwanted by the teacher, butthey will be effective and essential for the learner, consciously or unconsciously, and unluckily the most common reaction is plain translation, answering the question (in the head of the learner, and at times in the learner’s class practice) “What does it mean?”

Società Italiana di Traduttologia

CODICE FISCALE: 0000097027430582