Case studies as a vector of intercultural competencies in the teaching of languages, from “solid” to “liquid” approaches

Abstract

This research project presents the development of a didactic device, termed Case Studies for the Intercultural, (Jaeger, 2017) ensuring the double realisation of teaching objectives – teaching and learning by tasks (task-based learning) or by the resolution of problems (problem-based learning) and developing intercultural competences – and their implementation on the ground, throughout the course of four years of experimentation in higher learning. The didactic tool thereby integrates the double paradigmatic shift of the teaching of languages and cultures and of the teaching of the intercultural by drawing respectively on the action-based approach, and the hermeneutic approach. Using a process of ‘trial and error’, this research leads us to the creation of a new approach, the so-called Co-actional Interpretative Perspective (Jaeger, 2017) uniting the paradigmatic advances in the two fields. It necessitates starting from a ‘revamped’ notion of the intercultural (Dervin, 2010), put forward by critical researchers of diversity such as M. Abdallah-Pretceille (2003, 2012) and F. Dervin (2010, 2011), who propose the giving up of so-called solid categories, derived from cultural analysis, in order to turn towards dynamic and process-driven approaches, anchored in an anthropological understanding, and conceptualise intercultural competencies using liquid models (Baumann, 2001, 2010, Dervin, 2010, 2011). The empirical part of this research looks at how the didactic apparatus of Case Studies for the Intercultural (ibid.) – rooted in the action-based perspective and expanded upon in the vein of Puren (2002) in the Co-actional Interpretative Perspective (Jaeger,2017) – lends itself to the development of linguistic and intercultural communicative competencies, and how, for the intercultural component, it permits the progression from one paradigm to another; in other words, from “solid” to “liquid” approaches.

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