par Dainville, Julie ;Sans, Benoît
Référence ISLLLE: International Symposium on Language, Linguistics, Literature and Education(2-4 août 2016: Naha), Proceedings of the International Symposium on Language, Linguistics, Literature and Education
Publication Publié, 2016-07
Publication dans des actes
Résumé : Since its very beginning in Greece during the fifth century B. C., rhetoric has been taught. This training, as many sources still allow us to know, seemed to closely associate theory and practice through exercises. But since rhetoric was excluded from European school curricula, these pedagogical tools have been widely forgotten and cut from their original and practical goal. However, recent research in pedagogy, psychology and cognitive sciences tend to show that such exercises would still be very useful to stimulate skills like open-mindedness, flexibility, creativity, empathy, and tolerance in a multicultural context. Since July 2013, our research team (“Groupe de recherche en Rhétorique et Argumentation Linguistique”) has been working on a research project (“Training rhetoric: practical reason, creativity, citizenship”), supported by the Belgian National Research Funds, aiming at testing this hypothesis by giving rhetorical exercises, inspired by those practiced in Antiquity (the “progymnasmata”, and declamations), in Belgian secondary (high) schools and by observing their effects on the pupils. The course is based on the principle of the “dissoi logoi” (twofold arguments), an exercise probably invented by the first Sophists and which consisted in arguing successively for two opposite points of view on the same issue; this exercise allows to suspend personal opinion during the exercise in order to focus on technique and performance. Thanks to this, we progressively draw learners’ attention on various aspects of argumentation. Each lesson contents a writing exercise and is filmed. The results of our experiments are very encouraging: after only a couple of lessons the pupils are able to apply rhetorical notions in their compositions; they develop richer and more complex argumentations than in the beginning, succeed in using emotions and various argument’s types; more surprisingly, they also spontaneously develop other techniques (such as concessions or prolepsis with their typical linguistics markers) and skills that, from the teachers’ point of view, improve their everyday life at school and their ability to consider and respect other points of view. In this communication, we will successively expose the background, method, realizations and results of our project. Our hope is to share our experience with other specialists and to take benefit from their own practice and expertise.