Didactique du discours scientifique

Abstract

Academic discourse is a discursive genre with proven importance in scientific research. Besides epistemology and methodology, it constitutes the backbone that structures the researcher's mind. It is how the researcher expresses his thoughts and establishes relations with the scientific world. In the light of its importance, it would be appropriate for scientific discourse to be systematically taught in academic institutions. However, we notice that training programs overshadow this body of knowledge to the advantage of methodology and epistemology. This lack of didactic coverage is not devoid of consequences. Based on this observation, the present research aims at describing the impact of the insufficient didactisation of scientific discourse in Cameroonian higher education, at displaying the superstructure of this knowledge at the epistemological level, and finally, at making a tentative didactisation by suggesting ways of organizing and teaching this discourse through the first two cycles of university studies. To be more operational, the question that the topic aims at answering is the following: how can the constituting elements of research discourse be taught across the first five levels of university education for a better initiation of students to research? In response to this question, the general hypothesis put forward is that the mastery of the operational, symbolic and typological axes of epistemic discourse is liable to contribute to a better initiation of university students to research. To verify the hypothesis, a mixed approach involving documentary analysis on the one hand and a field survey by means of a questionnaire on the other was applied to a target population of students in research cycles and a corpus of extracts from theses, dissertations, and articles produced by young researchers undergoing their initiation. The conducted analysis supported the idea that epistemic discourse is indeed neglected at the university, an issue that results in many difficulties faced by students when it comes to writing their scientific works. This has led to the conclusion that it would be imperative to effectively set up a didactics of scientific discourse at the university, an exercise that requires some preliminary work: epistemology. By using methodological keys such as linguistic pragmatics and the analysis of discourse in interaction, we were able to reconstruct the structure of this teaching via a description of its three informational, symbolic and typological axes. Subsequently, suggestions for a teaching approach based on empirical, documentary, and actional work on this knowledge were made in the context of didactisation, with the support of a blueprint of competences that could be adapted to the different university series.