L’enseignement du vocabulaire : Une recherche sur des méthodes utilisées par des professeurs de FLE en Suède pour enseigner le nouveau vocabulaire aux lycéens

Sammanfattning: This essay aims to explain how teachers of FLE (French: French as a foreign language) teach new vocabulary to students in upper secondary school. In other words, the focal point of this investigation is to clarify which methodsthe teachers use when they explain new vocabulary in a classroom context and how they can support the students’ vocabulary acquisition.  The basis for this thesis is four interviews made in the south of Sweden in spring 2018 and a survey distributed to teachers of FLE through social media and emails. The results revel that the teachers consider that the vocabulary teaching and learning is nearly linked to continuous work with text translation and glossaries that the pupils have to learn by heart. The teaching is largely based on the French school books.  According to the results of our study, we can note that the teachers highlight through their teaching methods the comprehension rather than the utilization of the language. However, the majority of the informants explain new vocabulary in the target language and pictures and body language are used simultaneous in order to support the pupils’ comprehension. It is also possible to distinguish that the teachers change to the pupils’ mother tongue when they have to explain abstract vocabulary. To understand a specific context, the teachers encourage the pupils to make associations between English and French, to make links between the noun and the verb (choice– to choose), and to guess the meaning of one particular word by means of the context. The majority of the informants think that languages strategies are important in the process of acquisition of new vocabulary. Our results reveal that some of the informants apply strategies that can support the pupils’ language learning, but in general, we can’t distinguish a systematic use of methods aiming to teach languages strategies to upper secondary pupils.  The results and conclusions given in this essay may be of some interest for other teachers and educational researchers.