Abstract

This article takes up the contents of a lecture given on the occasion of a colloquium entitled "Ethics, citizenship and educational issues in language teaching and learning" at the Université d'Artois (France) in January 2023. I show that the Language Policy Unit of the Council of Europe, to which the organizers of the colloquium refer in their orientation text, represents a counter-model of democratic functioning, and that their proposals constitute a counter-model of "citizen didactics". As the pedagogy of reference of the actional perspective, namely the project pedagogy, requires, the problem of the formation of democratic citizenship in the language class is concretely that of the autonomy and the responsibility of the students in the conduct of their common learning project and in the realization of pedagogical projects, which implies the mobilization of all the methodological matrices available. While the proposals of the Council of Europe lead to the dissolution of language teaching in a vague "plurilingual and intercultural education", the citizenship training of students must be conceived in a very concrete way as the responsible management, between the teacher and the learners, of the modes and means of effective learning of the language.

Version française disponible: 2023c.