12– DIDACTICS OF THE CLG

Organizer :  ECATERINA BULEA BRONCKART, Unité de didactique des Langues, Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l’Education, Université de Genève.

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DESCRIPTION OF THE SESSION

The Course in General Linguistics is a work that came out of teaching: beyond the complex editorial conditions that history has reserved for it, this work bears, even in its title, the mark of the didactic nature of the circumstances in which the linguistic knowledge it contains took shape. Whereas ordinary teaching situations operate through a process of adapting scholarly knowledge worked out prior to its transmission (a process called “didactic transportation”, well documented today), the Course seems to crystalize a form of “inversed transposition”, in as much as it contains a theoretical construction (re-)elaborated on the basis of successive transformations that are sometimes hesitant, but certainly heterogeneous and contextualized.

In this session, papers dealt with the modes and implications of this initial didacticization of linguistic knowledge :

1. Saussure’s didactic practice, particularly in his courses in general linguistics: problematizing the form stamped on scholarly knowledge by the fact of having been tried out in and through the practice of teaching;
2. The courses of Saussure teachers and students: critical examination of the influence that certain of his teachers had on Saussure, and that Saussure had on certain of his students;
3. Didactics and research in the CLG: analysis of the traces of teaching(s) that subsist in the CLG: organization of lectures, construction of a progression, alternation between moments of the most elementary explanation and moments of theoretical deepening, use of examples, schemata, drawings etc.;
4. The CLG as a university textbook: discussion of the type of “textbook” that the Course represents for linguistics, indeed for the human sciences generally.

The objective is thus not only a better understanding of Saussure’s didactic practice, but also a grasp of its impact, direct or indirect, on setting up the domain of knowledge with which we operate (and which we transmit) today.

PLENARY SPEAKER

Marie-José BÉGUELIN, professeur honoraire, Université de Neuchâtel : « La dimension argumentative des Cours de linguistique générale : exemples, images, comparaisons ».

Page web : http://www2.unine.ch/marie-jose.beguelin