Development of Grammar Competence via Work with the Literary Text in Teaching FFL

Abstract

In this paper we deal with the issue of teaching foreign language grammar using literature in secondary schools. The aim of this paper is to propose and provide teachers of French as a foreign language with effective and practical didactic recommendations for teaching the past tenses in French through authentic literary text. Working with a literary text has the potential to contribute to the learner's self-development, to the development of his/her reading and language skills, to the development of critical thinking and other important aspects of his/her personality. The literary text chosen is the Quebec short story "Le petit bonhomme de graisse", which meets the criteria for selecting a text for didactic purposes in terms of content and scope. From a linguodidactic point of view, it corresponds to the language level B1 according to the CEFR, at which the learners are confronted with the chosen grammatical phenomenon and the problem of its application in communicative practice. When developing proposals for didactic procedure for working with the selected text, we come out from Rafajlovičová's research of the assessment of grammatical competence from the year 2016, which shows that the application ability of foreign language learners is significantly lower in comparison with the mechanical formation of grammatical forms. The partial aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of grammatical competence and its application to learners' communicational practice. In proposing activities related to authentic literary text, we take into account Slovak learners in Slovak schools, but nevertheless these proposals are applicable in the educational system of other countries, where French is taught as a foreign language. The topic of past tenses in French is one of the most difficult phenomenon to learn and use in communication, as the Slovak language operates with a different grammatical system. The proposed activities serve for effective teaching and acquisition of past tenses in French, not only their formation, but also their application to common communicative situations.