HOW TO WORK WITH A LITERARY TEXT TAKING ITS SPECIFICITIES INTO ACCOUNT

Abstract

In this paper I discuss a way of working the literary text in a French as aForeign Language course. Firstly, I work the definition of literary text and itscharacteristics. The literary text has specific characteristics that cannot be ignored whenit is used in the classroom. After that, I analyze two activities proposed by the didacticbooks Reflets Méthode de français 3 (2002) and Le Nouveau sans Frontière 4 –Méthode de français (1993) about passages of the book India Song (1975) and L’Amant(1984) by Marguerite Duras. The objective was to verify whether the pedagogicproposals respected the characteristics of the literary text that, according to Amor Séoud(1997), are polissemy, pleasure and interculturality. In the first method, the authors didnot consider the characteristics of the literary text when they proposed readingcomprehension questions, while the second method, even though not quite deep, makespertinent questions considering the characteristics of the literary text. Finally, I makesuggestions about the utilization of poems with initial students and I also show toprofessors the importance of having a reading project before the beginning of classes.