Global simulation: fostering students pro-activism in the learning of Frech in Anglophone countries

Abstract

Learning and teaching activities evolve together with the didactics research progress. In foreign language teaching, the communicative approach, developed in the 1970s, positioned learners at the epicentre of the learning-teaching process, exposing them to realistic and authentic communicative situations. New teaching activities and practices developed in order to answer the learner-centred approach needs, and simulation techniques found interest among many French foreign language experts. In the early 1980s, role-play activities were implemented in French foreign language classrooms and they became unavoidable activities in textbooks. They were eventually introduced as testing instruments in official certifications such as the French International Language Certificates DELF and DALF. The global simulation teaching technique, which appeared together with role-play, was more ambitious as it required learners to create and interact in a collective world of reference, in which they had to simulate fictional characters communicating with each other in a specific realist environment, and according to the on-going events and incidents occurring in this environment. In a global simulation, learners embark on a “realistic illusion” where they are actors as well as decision makers of the storyline. Unlike role-play, the global simulation teaching technique constitutes the core of the teaching content. This paper aims to define the Global Simulation process and its technicalities, and to analyse its potential pedagogical advantages and limitations. The paper will attempt to present origins and concepts of the Global Simulation in FFL to value its pedagogical advantages from teachers’ and learners’ points of view, and to underline the possible obstacles and/or limitations of this communicative tool.