Le tandem dans un atelier de théâtre au service d’une meilleure prononciation et d’une acceptation de soi en LVE

Abstract

This article presents a peer tutoring initiative developed within a community theatre workshop; part of a practice-based research project supported by the DRAC of the Pays de la Loire region. The program pairs young French-speaking participants with allophone learners. The francophone tutors support their peers in learning French as a second language (FSL) through theatrical exercises. The study focuses on one specific pair working on improving the pronunciation and intelligibility of a Ukrainian-speaking student.

Multimodal analysis of their interactions shows that the workshop goes beyond linguistic goals. It becomes a relational and affective space, echoing Grotowski’s (1971) vision of theatre as a “shared birth” and the “complete acceptance of one human being by another.” Anchored in the enactive paradigm (Varela, 1999), this research sees theatre not just as a tool for language acquisition, but as a “joint experience” (Aden, 2013) that embodies an “ethical know-how” (Varela, 1992). We hypothesize that the relational ecology created in such a theatrical context supports the learning of pronunciation prior to more technical corrective phonetics approaches (Nocaudie, Alazard-Guiu, Billières, 2019), ultimately enhancing the communicative abilities of young allophone learners.