FROM THE NEED FOR LITERARY LITERACY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING

The action-oriented approach advocated by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2001) stresses the importance of literary literacy in shaping language learners. In this paper, we aim at understanding comprehension difficulties in reading a literary text. We have found that our intermediate-level learners and even advanced-level learners do not understand a literary text when they read it on their own, except when the teacher reads it for them. However, the same learners do not have comprehension difficulties when it comes to informative, journalistic or instructional texts. Why is there a comprehension difficulty in reading literary texts if they are chosen considering the level to which they belong? To answer this question, we elaborated the didactic process advocated by Cyr (1998); Fayol and Gaonac'h (2005), that consists in silent reading and reading aloud, from the following corpus: a passage from the romance La Place, de Annie Ernaux, to intermediate learners, aiming at broadening house vocabulary, and a passage from the romance Une fille Zhuang, de Wei-Wei, to advanced learners, aiming at written production. Due to the lack of comprehension, we practiced an explicitation interview according to Pierre Vermersch (2010), in which the totality of the learners became aware of the source of the problem, according to which they do not know how to manage prosodic elements from the given text impairing sense building. Aware of this difficulty, the present paper ends with didactic reflections about the theme.