Chapitre 16. Intercompréhension autour d’une proposition d’écriture plurilingue d’une rencontre interculturelle

The chapter examines a particular writing experience in a plurilingual creative writing workshop led with French as Second Language adult learners at university. As part of their writing assignment, based on a French theatre play written by Jean Tardieu, learners were asked to write a fictive dialogue in which persons spoke different languages. Questions dealing with IC were raised such as the existence and pertinence of such exolingual dialogues, but also the reception of such texts. Collected data include class exchanges around writing process and resulting texts. Four types of interactions are examined: negotiation around the writing prompt, verification of language choices, negotiation of writing choices and reflexivity after writing. The author analyses several sequences based on learners questions, such as creating persons speaking different languages with errors, choosing languages that can be shared while maintaining IC, translating or not. She concludes that, even for a plurilingual speaker who uses several languages on a regular basis, writing a plurilingual text is not obvious. IC as such functions to mediate between learners’ identities and their lived experience