MOTS À CCP DÉSIGNANT DES ANIMAUX. SIGNIFICATIONS CULTURELLES ET POSSIBILITÉS D’EXPLOITATION EN CLASSE DE FLE
CCP WORDS DESIGNATING ANIMALS. CULTURAL MEANINGS AND POSSIBILITIES OF EXPLOITATION IN AN FFL CLASS

Summary/Abstract: Teaching a language also means learning words or expressions, lexical and grammatical structures, which by their history/etymology, convey a past, a history, a civilization. The close link between the linguistic system and the culture, a subject discussed more and more often in language teaching, determined the creation of the neologism « lexiculture », defined by its inventor Robert Galisson as « the culture conveyed by the culturally-loaded words » (1991). Each culture has its own cultural representations conveyed by the language and it is difficult to find exactly the same representations in other cultures. In some situations of communication, it’s impossible for a foreigner to understand the message if he/she doesn’t have the keys to decode the implicit cultural meaning. The functional approach in FFL didactics gives a lot of importance to this cultural dimension of natives, the shared culture, this culture which rules the majority of their attitudes, behaviours, representations and customs they obey. In our article, we intend to do a brief description of the shared cultural load representations as the product of set judgments conveyed by words referring to animals and by figurative phrases, but also as some traditions evoked by these words. Thus, the words fish, bear, horse, lamb, mule, pig, etc. carry a rich cultural load, this « added value » to their basic meaning serving as a mark of belonging and cultural identification. The discovery of the target culture will be the object of an evaluative and commented reflection work, allowing the students to communicate what they think about this new culture and in what ways this one is different from or similar to their own (contrastive approach). In this sense, we also intend to illustrate some ways of exploitation in the FFL class, starting from the analysis of implicit cultural meanings of some words referring to animals.

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