Proposal to use the study corpus for contemporary French in Didactics of French as a Foreign Language

The ORFÉO platform (Tools and Research on Written and Oral French) has been making available to users since 2018 a Study Corpus for sampled Contemporary French as well as operating tools. Although this resource is intended for an audience of researchers and students in the fields of linguistics and automatic language processing, we endeavor in this article to report on the didactic potential that it offers within the framework of a Licensing Syntax course treating “subordination” and intended for Czech and Slovak students at levels B1 to C1 in French. We propose a didactic sequence composed of four activities and pursuing three objectives: consolidation of the mastery of the basic functions of dont («which») from a corpus of friendly conversations; the use of simple query interface tools and the introduction of certain principles of corpus sociolinguistics. The corpus-based approach, by confronting learners with authentic contextualized data, helps to redefine the teaching-learning priorities of a language by giving primacy not to respect for grammatical norms but to genre norms.