| Summary: | Research is an essential part of the professionalization process for teacher trainees in French as a foreign language (FFL), and should supply native-speaker trainees with the means of developing their professional skills and identity. Such trainees have never experienced an FFL class themselves, and need to know how their conception of language and language teaching is influenced by their own previous classroom experience (Beacco 1990, 1992; Castellotti & de Carlo 1993, 1995; Cadet & Causa 2005, forthcoming; Cadet 2004). The pedagogical repertoire (Cicurel 2002; Cadet & Causa 2005) used by beginning teachers is frequently influenced by the functions and tasks that they had to execute themselves at school, when they studied French as their native language (FNL). These pedagogical models tend to dominate the first months and years of teaching practice, course content, methodology, classroom activities, and even teacher behavior. One of the most important functions of teacher training courses should, therefore, be to encourage “professional socialization” (Bourdoncle 2000), by having the trainees identify and analyze the models, representations, and educational culture that they already possess. In this article, we will describe these models and representations, as they appear in written work produced by groupe of FFL teacher trainees. We hope to provide stable, explicit definitions of these basic notions, which are frequently alluded to in research, but often implicitly; we will also attempt to illustrate how an explicit analysis of such notions can contribute to a sound training program.
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