The elaboration of a specialized french language program: analysis of the methodological preliminaries

Abstract

The language courses for specific purposes address to an audience who must acquire, in a limited time and for closer or more distant utilities, a capital of linguistic and cultural knowledge, necessary for the progress of his activity in a different context than that one of the language-culture of origin. The diversity of the contexts and of the learning situations can be found in the methods, practices and objectives of the act of teaching also. Teaching specialized languages means for a teacher of modern languages to interact with professional fields often new to him, to meet the actors of these fields, to know the characteristic situations and the communicative exchanges that they make. In order to elaborate an educational material for the specialized foreign languages classes, the teacher has often at his/her disposal - and more increasingly these last years - manuals of “modern languages on specific purposes” (with an overwhelming dominance of the economic field, law, tourism). In this paper, we are firstly concerned with the analysis of the approach for achieving a course of specialized languages. We took as a theoretical basis for our approach the elaboration of a specialized language course in five steps, as proposed by Jean-Marc Mangiante and Chantal Parpette (Le Français sur objectif spécifique: de l’analyse des besoins à l’élaboration d’un cours, Hachette, 2004) and we discussed each step in the case of foreign language classes associated with a non-philological university field. Our conclusion is that developing a course of language for specific purposes means privileging the thematic component, which can be supplemented with audio-visual documents and activities in order to develop, complementarily, the skills covered by the CEFR for Languages.