Pour un enseignement-apprentissage au diapason des mutations sociétales et technologiques. L’image comme médiateur et vecteur des acquis symboliques

Abstract

At a time when images seem to constitute one of the dominant frameworks through which individuals perceive and interpret reality, we argue that teaching practices must make effective use of the unprecedented communicative abundance available to contemporary educational actors by engaging in the rigorous pedagogical exploitation of authentic documents circulating within the digital ecosystem. Indeed, in order to respond to the linguistic and ethical needs of a new type of language user—one who seeks not only mastery of grammatical rules, but also the development of language proficiency as a means of communication, action, and socialization in real-life contexts—it is essential to draw on contemporary pedagogical materials that foreground semiotic systems in which learners may identify themselves and negotiate meaning.

Furthermore, in the digital age, marked by the pervasive influence of images on language-related activities, it would be inappropriate, in our view, to design learning objectives or instructional tools without taking into account the language of images, its evolution, and the technological transformations that have shaped it. Reading today entails the interpretation of both verbal and visual texts; hence the importance of mobilizing sociological, psychological, linguistic, communicative, and intercultural competences on the part of both teachers and learners in order to access the global meaning of authentic documents.

Moreover, this architecture of meaning, oriented toward the construction of plausible understanding, necessarily emerges from the complex articulation of these simultaneous sources of information, since meaning is no longer organized solely in a linear manner, but increasingly in a spatial one.