Foreign Language Didactics as a Human Science

Abstract

Various aspects of foreign language didactics as a discipline have been in focus of my interest: the field’s characteristics as a relatively autonomous (as opposed to primarily interdisciplinary) academic endeavor in search of understanding; the field’s constitution as a science as opposed to pre-science or language teaching methodology; the meaning of “normal science” at the time of questioning the cognitive power of sciences; and last, but not least, the field’s properties as an empirical scientific discipline with pure and applied goals. Constraints resulting from the above considerations justify a bottom-up strategy of modeling the field’s subject matter. In contrast to the influential linguistically-driven top-down strategy, this means targeting human beings who use language in verbal communication, i.e. act as producers and comprehenders of verbal messages in speech and writing (Balconi ed. 2010). The fact that the subject matter of foreign language didactics is constituted by human subjects involved in language use brings us to the main question of the article: What is the significance of this modeling strategy for the overall characterization of language use in foreign language didactics as a subfield of humanities. The article lists and discusses nineteen properties of language use in this decentered, humanly anchored perspective in clear contrast with the view of language as a formal system unfolding in time, influential in the earlier stages of foreign language research. The ensuing characteristics cluster around such more general issues as the whole-person involvement in verbal communication; life-span development of language use; the centrality of meaning and its constructive and evaluative nature. The nineteen features resulting from the bottom-up modeling strategy selected for the field of foreign language teaching provide further support for discriminating between the criteria of science in the hard or natural sciences and in the humanities.