Advisers’ knowledge: Learner representations

The whole issue will be to detect the learner’s representations. And you need to have the necessary references to do this. When a young person suggests that for them language is a bunch of words, because that’s often how they think of language, for example, that it’s a bunch of words and that a word in French corresponds to a word in the foreign language we’re learning, well, there’s work to be done. But if you yourself don’t have a clear idea of what a language is and what language means in terms of inter-individual relations, etc., you won’t be able to help them build on that. So obviously, whether we’re talking about socio-linguistics or psycho-linguistics, this is essential information to help the child identify the areas in which he or she needs to work, and then to point him or her in the right direction. Because there’s also all the knowledge you need in terms of didactics to help you make the right choices. Of course, we’re always faced with learners who aren’t aware of what it means, for example, to understand what it means to understand, or how I’m going to learn to understand. It’s something they never ask themselves in their heads. For teenagers, understanding is something magical. And often when they start, when they come to see us for the first time, they say I want to know how to speak. When we think of learning a language as a teenager, we think of speaking the language, not understanding it. But here’s an essential fact: once they’ve understood that comprehension is an enveloping skill in relation to production, we’ve already come a long way. So obviously you need to have a clear idea of the didactic approaches you need to take to build this up.