Recueillir, analyser et didactiser les représentations d’apprenants et d’enseignants : le cas d’un questionnaire quantitatif sur la norme orale du français

International audienceLearner’s beliefs affect the processes by which a language is learned and taught (Castellotti & Moore, 2002). It is not only important that they be accounted for because of their impact on what teachers think and do in a teaching and learning situation, but also because it allows teachers to adapt their curricula to the needs acknowledged by the learners. Factoring in the needs of learners is a timely issue given that language learning programs currently face important changes such as dematerialization or autonomy (Grin & Vaillancourt, 2015). This paper presents an international quantitative survey completed by 350 teachers of French as a foreign language, 251 learners of French, and 33 linguists. The data simulate a discussion about beliefs concerning norms of spoken French, as regards the oral characteristics of the French language, as well as learning and teaching goals. The empirical approach undertaken suggests that accounting for the beliefs of the participants of a teaching and learning situation is an important step within the overall process of designing a syllabus. This paper suggests that surveying the beliefs of teachers’ and learners’ is important for pedagogical engineering, with the aim of deconstructing such beliefs by using them as learning material and through the behaviour/action of the teacher