Pour une cartographie critique des fondements théoriques de l’approche communicative d’enseignement des langues étrangère

This work undertakes a critical analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of the Communicative Approach (CA), one of the most influential methodologies in foreign language teaching of the past half-century. It argues that the CA, emerging from a legitimate reaction against structuralist abstraction and methods perceived as overly decontextualized, was built upon an “unfounded eclecticism.” In its aspiration to embrace the totality of language as communication, it amalgamated – without proper distinction – concepts from heterogeneous epistemological registers (traditional grammar, scientific linguistics, and popular knowledge) and occasionally incompatible theoretical fields (sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics). A close examination of the foundational texts by Littlewood (1981), Hymes (1972), and Widdowson (1978) reveals the persistent yet concealed subordination of use to system, as well as the treatment of logically hierarchical dimensions – where linguistic knowledge necessarily conditions sociolinguistic knowledge – as equivalent and merely combinable entities. This confusion, inscribed at the very heart of the founding texts, produces a theoretical aporia that invalidates the approach's constitutive principles. Consequently, despite its unifying ambition, the CA fails to deliver a theoretically coherent methodological response to the ontological complexity of language. This cartography advocates for a rigor based on the explicit articulation of the limits and dependency relations between the different levels of linguistic reality.