And They Recite...

Learning a "foreign" language means responding to the need to speak. This involves integrating an entire set of new and sometimes bewildering codes: vocabulary, syntax, and phonetics. The task may seem overwhelming, and yet, as soon as the learner enters into the language, they become engaged in the process of making it their own and reusing it, a process that serves both to consolidate what has been learned and to continually expand what might be called communicative competence.

Poetic texts, which appeal to the imagination and sensitivity, provide a privileged pathway to expression and to the act of speaking. At school, a traditional exercise is recitation, whose value never grows old and which involves comprehension, memorization, intonation, articulation, and emotional engagement—provided, of course, that a well-delivered text is one that is truly felt.

Reciting a text in another language, a target language, without reference to one's own language—the mother tongue or source language that has permeated our mental world since the cradle—may seem difficult, strange, and unsettling.

Thus, proposing a back-and-forth between the target language and the source language through an original translation necessarily changes the approach. Some may object that this is an inappropriate, or even impossible, exercise. Indeed, how can one remain faithful to meter, rhythm, and sound? What becomes of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme? For these young people, however, it is in fact an act of making the meaning and originality of a work their own, within their respective languages and cultural environments. When they recite alternately in the "target language" and the "source language," they naturally demonstrate their desire to speak.

The Need to Speak