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Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
GUIDED SELF-LEARNING
LITERACY:
In A Plurilingual Communication-
Oriented
Knowledge Society
Éditions La Dondaine, Olliergues, France
July 30, 2022
ABSTRACT
Since 2019, we have been living in a pandemic, COVID-19, and a second
epidemic has been developing for six months or so now, Monkeypox. Both
epidemics started by jumping from wild animal species to man. I will not discuss
these events more at the medical level which is in no way within my field of
competence.
But- these epidemics and COVID-19 as a pandemic, still going on, have forced
us to take measures we would never have thought possible, except in war time.
Schools were closed. Confinement and total isolation were cast upon cities, or even
provinces, or even countries to isolate the sick and protect the non-sick.
Transportation was disrupted both for goods and for people. The Health system all
over the world was overloaded and close to breaking point and collapse. That
forced us to rethink education, and distant schooling was encouraged with today’s
communications technology: 4G where optical fiber was available or where satellite
networks existed, Virtual Reality where it was developed and feasible, Artificial
Intelligence and Deep Learning on smartphones, tablets, and computers.
I have been testing and developing guided self-learning in various Paris
universities when students and institutions permitted but using it very systematically
in private institutions where computers, tablets, and the Internet are available for
all students. I have also worked with post-graduate professionals, mostly but not
only in the medical field, with strong demand in start-up companies who need to
work on foreign languages to reach the world.

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The following research and report concern one CEO of a medical start-up
company that I identify as the Nordic God Odin. It is only one cycle of work on Erin
Meyer’s book “The Culture Map” after more than six years of guided self-learning
on his side. He was the first gentleman in this experience (though I had had a
student assistant when teaching at Paris Sorbonne and after, from 2010 to 2016
who was also working on such guided self-learning to assist me in my research),
but he came after several young ladies who had the same needs for English in their
professional fields.
So, here is the research and report on this cycle of guided self-learning that
becomes in its conclusions some kind of manifesto, certainly more than a set of
recipes, because there are very few recipes. It all depends – on principle – on the
self-learner, the subject he/she chooses, the motivation and commitment he-she
demonstrates, and of course the circumstances of life.
GUIDED
SELF-LEARNING
LITERACY
in a
Plurilingual Communication-Oriented

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Knowledge Society
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
INTRODUCTION
The title means exactly what it says. Anyone who wants to develop some
communication with the world at any economic, cultural, philosophical, political,
mediatic level, or whatever other objectives this communication may have in our
modern globalized world, will have to be plurilingual, speak and understand three
or more languages, and be able to update their competence permanently on their
own initiative, hence on a self-learning basis with or without a guiding person or,
for daily basic needs, an Artificial Intelligence coach, and as you can see a duo is
only fully operative when it becomes a trio because to become and be or remain a
plurilingual literate speaker, you have to govern your own constant learning by
yourself with the help of a human coach, now and then, and an artificial Intelligence,
all the time.
I will first try to identify the targeted audience of this research: who are the
people we are defining here as communication literate and self-learning literate?
They are people who went to school and then high school for at least twelve years,
and commonly for a fair section of these, up to two to six years of higher college or
university education, two years being a minimum for all those who want to have a
real career in any field. These two minimum years are either highly specialized
commercial, economic, industrial, or technical studies. The students end up being
highly qualified technicians, salespeople, social or cultural workers, and
administrative or managing officers, all of them, no matter whether public or private,
and they all are required to be highly autonomous. Beyond we are dealing with
people who have Master’s Degrees or have reached professional degrees like
Medical Doctor’s degrees, Engineer’s certification, Pharmacist’s doctorate, or
equivalent diplomas, and of course, without forgetting all the people targeting
research, development, and PhDs of any nature.
All these people are the future of our world, of its development, of its
globalization, and as such have to be absolutely autonomous in their learning to be
able to get the knowledge they need for their daily functioning. They should
encounter no limits on their road for this knowledge they need. I assume they all
have access to 4G soon 5G communication, and all it means in terms of open
access (which means free but not necessarily without a price, priceless might even
be very expensive), easily-attainable licensing, open innovation, and particularly
the tools necessary to find, capture, and download any document in any language
with the necessary translating machine to have it in one of at least three languages

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any person at this level should be able to read, speak and understand, two at least
being two of the half-a-dozen or eight common communicational languages in the
world.
In the developed world of today, the elites of the previous generations, up to
2000, were at best required to be fluent, semi-fluent, or averagely fluent in one
foreign language. Today the norm is two foreign languages (one of which could be
the language of the concerned person’s mother or father if different from the local
national or official language. Such an objective – and this is true in any subject or
discipline, topic, or activity – is only attainable if we move into guided self-learning.
The developed world is at a tremendous disadvantage as compared to the
developing world. The developed world inherit the practices and blockages of two
centuries – at least – of education defined by the dominant educational institutions
as based on one teacher, or several teachers at the secondary level, supposedly
detaining – locked up in their minds – all the knowledge in the world and distributing
it to the learners according to their age, their sex, their social origin, their social
perspective, and all that was a very rigid Gestalt, and in the developed world, mostly
North America and Europe, the only basic big social mobility was the migration from
farm work to industrial work, from being farmworkers to becoming industrial and
eventually commercial basic workers.
This migration in the developed world came to an end around 1968. I choose
this date because at this moment, all over the developed world, West or East in
Europe, this rural exodus was finished and the industrialization that took place after
the Second World War was mostly completed. New questions appeared and
particularly to shift from a six-seven-at-most-eight-year pattern of compulsory
education to a full-twelve-year design. That will only be approached, as an objective,
in France under Mitterrand in the 1980s but the objective is far from being reached.
In 2022, only 79.2% of all 18-year-olds have a full high school education in France
with a standard high school degree. In the USA, a strong debate opposes those
who want to include the students who have a General Education Development
(GED) certificate as being equivalent to a high school degree. 93% of the 18–24-
year-olds have a high school education if you include GED holders, but only 82%
if you do not. To know more about this debate you can check what Douglas N.
Harris wrote on Monday, March 2, 2020, for Brookings (The Brookings Institution,
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW Washington, DC 20036) at
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/03/02/are-
americas-rising-high-school-graduation-rates-real-or-just-an-accountability-fueled-
mirage/. We all know about the present battle for free two-year college education
in the USA, a battle that is far from being won. We are 54 years after 1968.
What I am going to deal with then is how can we help these new professional
workers, be they engineers, or administrative, commercial, or industrial technicians,
reach an objective they have not reached within their regular education for the
simple reason it was not the objective of foreign language teaching in secondary
schools. I will speak mostly from my direct experience in France, but it is not only

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valid for France. I believe we can consider it valid for the whole developed world.
The developing world has the advantage of being able to invent a new education
system, experiment with innovative solutions, and above all not being hampered by
an old at times stilted or constrained system inherited from the mostly colonial past
that imposed colonial education. But we have to keep in mind that any crisis in the
world will bring at times deep disturbances, and some people, in the political world
or the economic domain, will try to pull the blanket to themselves, to get a financial
first or political second profit on the back of the difficulties millions of people may
experience daily. COVID-19 has enabled a small minority of people in the world to
increase their fortunes while for most people it meant some kind of unemployment,
some loss of revenue, and some precarity that became difficult to compensate for
because the war in Ukraine is exacerbating economic tensions in the world.
All that to say guided self-learning is going to become the only way to catch
up on our losses and rebuild some stability in what is becoming more and more
precarious. The world can only change if, daily, every single individual commits
themselves to the mobilization of their minds and their deeper meditation, implying
their moral or ethical variously motivated dimensions, to improve their own
meritorious actions and behaviors, in bodily deed, speech, and thought
(Dhammapada, Verses 231-234). That is self-learning guided by the general
wisdom that we are, each one of us, the masters of our freedom that can only
generate – and be generated by – the freedom of the whole human society we live

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in. To illustrate the change I am speaking of, I will give one graph about the US
population under age 18: race-ethnic profiles, 1990-2020.1
This chart reveals that the population of up to 18-year-old teens, hence young
people who go to grade school in the USA, is no longer white, and this white
population is going down fast. The majority of the US population up to 18 years of
age is ethnically dominated and this proportion is increasing fast, with the blurring
element of the individuals who define themselves as bi-ethnic (2+ ethnic or racial
references) mostly concerning children and teens with one parent who would be
classified as black. This produces a section bringing together Blacks and 2+ races
that moved from 19.1% in 2010 to 21.6% in 2020, hence a 2.5 percentile increase,
hence a 13.08% increase rate. White supremacy is losing all its appeal in a
population that is more and more ethnic. The decrease of the white population is
6.2 percentile points from 2010 to 2020, hence a decrease rate of 11.58%. It is this
evolution in the USA, but the same or similar in the world, which explains the
necessity first, to globalize our world, and second, to become plurilingual to cope
with the more and more diverse populations in our countries, be they the West or
just the Rest. We have to be inclusive to simply follow – what about to precede? –
the ethnic-geo-demographic evolution of the world? And this is clear in the following
map.
1
REPORT, Anti-CRT bills are aimed to incite the GOP base—not parents, William H.
Frey, Wednesday, March 30, 2022, Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/research/anti-crt-
bills-are-aimed-to-incite-the-gop-base-not-parents/

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This map reveals that these people who were still 18 or under in 2020, have
been arriving into the voting body of the USA. If they register properly in order to
vote, they have been becoming an extremely important element in any election
after 2020, and probably even already in 2020. And once again, the increase rate
of this younger population shows the number of states where they will reach the
50% level is going to increase fast over the next ten years, maybe even already the
case in 2020.
Without any more ado, let’s get into the main research on our topic.
Table of Contents

8.
« I have made you a God, Odin the Nordic God
Wagner called Wotan. » [J’ai fait de toi un Dieu, Odin, le
Dieu Nordique que Wagner appelle Wotan.] C’est comme
cela que le Professeur Jacques Coulardeau a décidé de me nommer
après sept années passées à m’enseigner l’anglais.
Qu’est-ce que cela peut-il bien signifier ?
J’ai consulté Wikipédia pour essayer d’y voir plus clair.
Odin est le dieu des morts, de la victoire et du savoir.
Difficile à interpréter, mais pas impossible pour Odin : Odin parce
que mon niveau d’anglais est revenu d’entre les morts. Odin parce
sept années de cours d’anglais constituent en soi une victoire. Odin
parce qu’au-delà de l’anglais ma culture générale n’a fait que croître
au cours de ces vingt triades et quatre cycles de travail.
Ce livre présente le dernier cycle d’activités que nous avons
menées ensemble autour du livre d’Erin Meyer, The Culture Map. J’ai
choisi ce livre car je suis à un moment de ma vie professionnelle où
je dois apprendre non plus à parler anglais pour communiquer avec
d’autres cultures, mais à apprendre à travailler avec d’autres cultures.
Comme à son habitude Jacques a su pousser plus loin ma lecture de
ce livre grâce à sa méthode d’auto-apprentissage guidé.
"I have made you a God, Odin the Nordic God Wagner
calls Wotan." This is how Professor Jacques Coulardeau
decided to name me after seven years of English courses.
What could that possibly mean? I consulted Wikipedia
to find out.
Odin is the god of death, victory, and knowledge.
Difficult to interpret, but it is not impossible for Odin: I am Odin
because my level of English was brought back from the land of the
dead. Then, I am Odin because seven years of English lessons is a

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victory in itself. Finally, I am Odin, because, beyond my English, my
general knowledge has grown tremendously during these twenty
triads and four cycles of work.
This book presents the latest cycle of work we have carried out
together around Erin Meyer's book The Culture Map. I chose this
book because I am at a point in my professional life when I no longer

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have to learn to speak English to communicate with other cultures but
to learn how to work with other cultures.
As usual, Jacques was able to push my reading of this book
deeper thanks to his guided self-learning method.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
(Bordeaux, 1945)
Biographical note/ Note biographique
He was educated at the
University Michel de Montaigne
Bordeaux III, the University of
California at Davis California, and
the University Charles de Gaulle
Lille III in general structural
linguistics, phylogenic linguistics,
and Germanic linguistics. He was a
visiting lecturer at UC Davis
(teaching English Literature),
University Bordeaux III (teaching
English translation), University Lille
III (teaching English linguistics),
Buddhist Center at Pidurangala Sri
Lanka (teaching the English of
Buddhism), University Perpignan
at Mende (teaching the English of Tourism), University Paris II
Panthéon Assas (teaching the English of Intellectual property),
University Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne (teaching the English of
communication, technology, video and cinema, history, political
science), University Paris Dauphine (teaching the English of
economics and payroll management), University Paris Est Créteil Val
de Marne (teaching the English of economics), University Versailles
Saint Quentin en Yvelines at Mantes la Jolie (the English of
sustainable economics), University Paris VIII Vincennes Saint-Denis
(teaching the English of History). He holds two PhDs in Germanic
linguistics and the Didactics of Foreign Languages. His research has
been essentially in linguistics, English and American literature and
arts, drama, opera, and cinema. In 2005 he entered the field of

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Buddhism and Pāli linguistics and went back to phylogenic linguistics
with his present research on the Language of Cro-Magnon and the
relations between the phylogeny of language, the migrations of Homo
Sapiens out of Black Africa, and the classification of languages. He
also studied the position of women in pre-Ice-Age-peak and pre-
Magdalenian human society, and the central social and spiritual role
they played up to the development of agriculture. He is often working
with younger assistants for various projects, among others Paula
Osorio from Venezuela and Ivan Eve from Paris Sorbonne. He has
taken part and presented contributions to many international
conferences in Europe and Northern America. He is vastly published
in the USA, in Europe, in New Zealand, and on the Internet as a
researcher, a reviewer on the various Amazon sites, as research and
literary author at Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, and as an
independent researcher at
www.academia.edu or
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jacques_Coulardeau.
He is a content writer on Medium.com at
https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/
CONCLUSION(S)
LITERACY IN OUR MODERN WORLD
[…]
- The Template of Guided Self-Learning.
a- Self-learning choices: the self-learner controls it
all. i- the topics; ii- at least 50% of the documents; iii- the self-learners must
do some research, express their ideas based on collected facts, and be
contradictory or open to contradictory elements.
b- The media. i- at least one oral medium; ii- at least one visual
medium; iii- at least one written medium; iv- Virtual Reality; v- Artificial
Intelligence; vi- holography and hologrammatic transfer.
c- The objective is professional. i- learning proficiency or literacy; ii-
communicational literacy: oral, written, digital (techneracy); iii- Multicultural
proficiency and literacy; iv- Diversity and inclusion: people, cultures and
languages, and finally differences (no homogenization, no hybridization, no
hierarchization).
10

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d- Main concepts. Multi- and pluri-proficiency. Multi- and pluri-literacy.
Multifaceted comprehensive diversity and multifarious versatile inclusion.
Multi- and plurilateralism.
Multi-ism and Pluri-ism.
e- Multiplicity. Multiplicit class, multiplicit school, multiplicit society,
multiplicit individuals, multiplicit personalities, multiplicit motivation, and
multiplicit ambition.
f- Guiding Ethics. i- Flexibility; ii- Guide-coach-teacher, no guru, no
fathomless encyclopedia, no omniscient beacon, no final or even dominant
truth; iii- Truth is not a given but it is a never-completed construct.
Ebook avaialable in all Amazon Kindle
Stores
ASIN : B0BJF4YJ8P
Éditeur : Éditions La Dondaine, Olliergues, France
Publication date : October 16, 2022
Langue : Anglais
Price : US$9.00 €9.26