Questioning Questions in Autobiographies of Intercultural Encounters

1. Theoretical Framework

We can state our research question as follow:”Which kind of discourse is encouraged by AIEY questions and to which extent it affect pupils’ answers”?

In order to answer our research question, we draw on Benveniste's definition of discourse (1966, p. 242): “Each enunciation which supposes a speaker, a listener and a speaker’s intention to influence the other in a way or in another”. Based on this definition, on one hand, we focus on one of the COE’s discourses (i.e., the AIEY) and its influence on educational paradigms of intercultural education. On the other hand, we observe how AIEY users react to this discourse. We bear in mind Fairclough’s position (2012, p. 11) according to which “Discourses are semiotic ways of construing aspects of the world (physical, social or mental) that can generally be identified with different positions or perspectives of different groups of social actors”. Hence, we apprehend the AIEY discourse as an attempt to construct and to model an idea of international relationships according to COE politics.