An Equilibrated Use of Factual, Social, and Pragmatic Content to the Rescue of French Foreign Language Teachers in Lesotho

Résumé fourni par la source

The concept of content in education is an overarching subject of scrutiny in research, in that it highlights, among other things, the distinction between schooled (factual) knowledge and everyday (social) knowledge stemming from diverse sources. This chapter sought to explore whether such a tension exists between factual and social knowledge among Lesotho teachers of French as a foreign language. The contribution of the study was to establish how this possible tension could be negotiated by teachers in reconciling the two to produce pragmatic knowledge. The theory of enactment strategies and the natural identity framework were adopted to advance the notion of striking a balance between “what”, “how” and “who”; and to introduce the philosophical “why” question to education. Five purposefully selected participants took part in one-on-one semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that factual content is put at the helm of education at the expense of social content. This results in an imbalanced distribution of knowledge, wherein social/common-sense knowledge is not given legitimate recognition, thereby rendering it inutile. This impedes the honing of personalised/habitual content, which is bred by an equilibrated balance of factual and social content. This chapter thus recommends equal recognition of both schooled and everyday knowledge when addressing both professional (what) and social (how) needs, in producing pragmatic content, which speaks to unique individualised needs. In this way, in addition to the “what” and “how” questions, the “who” and “why” questions would be addressed; and ideally, contextualisation of content would be seen as a necessity in ensuring that knowledge is evenly distributed, both factually and segmentally.

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