In this chapter, the author presents some of her creative courses or workshops at Aix-Marseille University and in a local medical centre, as well as a new action research project in creative pedagogy. As a lecturer, she has developed an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research, infusing her academic teaching with creative, plurilingual practices. She became aware of the pleasures of thinking and writing between languages when studying English poetry for her PhD in French, as well as of the negotiation of the cultural and conceptual mismatches between the discourses of English poetry criticism and French academia, and between interior and exterior languages, but with a crossover effect: a language of intimacy from which one was estranged by distance, a language of exteriority in the immediate environment. The creative energy of language learning, and the pleasure learners take in the phonetics and physicality of foreign words, led the author to develop a pedagogical approach designed to include what Yoann Loisel calls the ‘maternal side of language’. She references Julia Kristeva’s chora to convey the way creative translation and plurilingual creative writing workshops offer the possibility of playing with new ‘ways of [writing]’, new ‘manners of being’.

The introduction sets out the dual purpose of the book: to present the editors’ research on the residual presence of the Mother tongue in second language learning, and to showcase a selection of essays by Francophone authors whose thinking on the Mother tongue has influenced their own. They wish to introduce the concept of the langue mat-rangère, or ‘(M)other tongue’. This term conveys the way the second language comprises an in-matrie dimension that underlies speech in a foreign language. By presenting the foreign language as an act involving the body, they highlight the place that should be given to the mother tongue in second language learning. Thanks to the multidisciplinary creative pedagogy they promote, the forgotten or repressed mother tongue finds its place again, making it easier to learn the foreign language. Two second language learning situations are described: the foreign language started at school, usually at about eleven years old, and the second language that is grafted onto the original language in a context such as migration. Both situations reveal a common denominator between them: the central role played in second language learning by the original Mother tongue, in its most archaically emotional, sensory, and bodily dimension.