META-REFERENTIAL ASPECTS IN DIDACTIC COMMUNICATION
META-REFERENTIAL ASPECTS IN DIDACTIC COMMUNICATION

Summary/Abstract: Glottodrama is a research-program regarding the didactic dimension of teaching foreign languages through linguistic and theatrical devices and methods. This project encompasses interdisciplinary characteristics and it is an obvious and indicative example of applying the Lifelong Learning Program of the European Union in educational institutions from Romania. Being coordinated by the Linguistic Research Laboratory of Culturiana Publishing Company (Italy), the method aims at experimenting this original method which involves communicative and dramatic procedures. The didactic strategies involving a language-teacher and a drama-teacher are complex and cover an extraordinary diversity of social and cultural contexts. The students learn the foreign language through acting diverse parts from different classical or original theatrical texts. Their performances are filmed and recorded. Watching and hearing these didactic materials, the students can improve and correct their verbal and non-verbal communication. They allow to the students to perceive acutely life and culture of different civilizations in which they enter linguistically and theatrically. The present paper deals with the meta-referential aspect in didactic communication. Theoretically, the meta-referential approach involves a move from a first cognitive or communicative level to a superior one at which the referents become self-reflexively signs or even meta-signs. This human capacity to watch, see, act and, verbally and mentally, interpret itself is a very interesting and defining one for the essence of a human being. This metareferential entrance may be read in two opposite ways: an absolute hyperbole of creative teaching-methods and an exceptional staging of real life. The students watch themselves in the filmed, recorded materials as in a mirror. A divided self is exposed in different milieux or media showing social and physical details which are different of its own. Diverse portraits and social or cultural contexts intermingle with the inner openings and the specific features of various civilizations via media and drama devices.

• Details
• Contents