El estatuto del texto literario en los métodos de FLE

Resum

The purpose of this paper is to study the value and the function given to literary texts in some of the most-widely-used FFL (French as a Foreign Language) secondary school textbooks in Spain. After an analysis of the objectives behind the use of literary texts and of the skills which those objectives are supposed to activate, we may conclude that these textbooks support an «extratextual» reading of the literary text; namely, that the formal specificity of the literary text is almost systematically «sacrificed» in favour of purely functional or pragmatic aspects. In this «deviation»- which lies in the use of the literary text as an excuse to «get out of it», instead of interrogating it as an autonomous semiotic object-there seem to exist three closely related strategies. The first strategy is to use the text as a platform for a pedagogy centred on the oral aspects of the language. The second one is the «visual translation» of the text by means of a rich iconic apparatus whose objective is to «facilitate» (and also to simplify) comprehension. The third and last strategy is related to the importance given to the learner’s vécu (his/her emotional and empirical background) as a key for the interpretation of the text. According to these operations of «denaturalisation», we may conclude that these FFL textbooks maintain and strengthen a realistic implicit discourse about literature, since their almost exclusive interest in the reality outside the text (the referential function) eliminates the attention that should be given to the signal and to its signification (the poetic function).