Perspectives for the didactics of “interculturation” : Discourses about inter-societal relationship in textbooks for French as a foreign / second language (Greece, Lebanon, Morocco)
In the field of second language and culture didactics, cross-cultural approaches seem to be going through a phase of crisis as a consequence of the deconstruction of the concept of culture itself : such a crisis reveals a fundamental discrepancy between didactic theories and classroom practices. Cross-cultural approaches presently need the identification of new objects of investigation, linked by the concept of diversity. Diversity is not quite conceived as a plurality of elements, but rather as a dynamic and complex cluster of relationships between societies : in other words, a process of « interculturation » rather than « interculturality ». The aim of this research is to investigate whether this new paradigm can help rethink the cultural dimension of language teaching in a classroom context ; given that this form of teaching is essentially carried out by means of textbooks, this study focuses on their discourse, in the attempt to determine in which measure they present forms of « interculturation » between societies, as well as which kinds of inter-societal relations they display. Since the Greek, Lebanese and Moroccan contexts are characterised by different forms of sociocultural diversity, the study of textbooks from these three countries can help assess the opportunities and challenges of teaching « diversity » through textbooks, and highlight the complex role of institutional discourses in educational contexts, caught between diversity and unity within one nation.