Activité(s) de définition dans l’apprentissage d’une langue seconde

Why should foreign language students learn to define lexical meanings? Such a metalinguistic, decontextualized activity is on the one hand thought of as highly difficult and on the other poorly considered from a communicative angle. Against the background of Bialystok’s model (1991) of linguistic knowledge, the present paper argues in favor of an early integration of definional activities in foreign language teaching. Such a pedagogical task brings benefits in a middle and long term perspective, whereby the learner’s linguistic, and specially lexical knowledge can be structured. With this in mind, the second part of the article details and discusses a series of definitional
activities for A2 learners of French as foreign language.