Living the puzzle La Joconde (or The Mona Lisa)

The production of a multimodal narrative in French as a Foreign Language

Abstract

This article has as its object the process of creating the multimodal narrative entitled La Joconde (in English, The Mona Lisa), which was elaborated by the co-author of this work at the time of her bachelor’s degree in Language and Literature (French) as a final assessment task of said bachelor’s degree at the University of São Paulo (USP), which was taught in 2020 by the co-author of this article. Through the analysis and discussion of the aforementioned multimodal narrative, we intend to reflect not only on how the production of multimodal narratives can contribute to teaching and learning additional languages in the university context, but also on how such processes can influence the training of language teachers. To this end, the article is anchored in the perspective of Didactic Engineering (DOLZ, 2016), initially proposing a brief theoretical foray into the Multimodality Theory (KRESS; VAN LEEUWEN, 2006), the diachronicity of narratives (BRUNER, 1991) and attributes of digital narratives (ROBIN, 2006). After describing the methodology applied, a three-phase analysis is carried out: the first focuses on the description and analysis of the corpus (whose main object is the narrative mentioned above), the second focuses on the description and analysis of the process of preparing this corpus and the third part focuses on the analysis of multimodal narrative based on the theories described above. We conclude that the production and critical evaluation of multimodal narratives favor the language teaching-learning process through the development of a global multimodal competence, subjectively activated through authorial writing.