The education for the sustainable development in french classes for specific purposes

Abstract

The concept of sustainable development has become an integrant one, meant to establish the balance between elements with a priori different operating modes. It is, firstly, a way to tackle the solution of the problems affecting all living beings on our planet; the sustainable development means awareness of the fragility of the world, changing of our vision of the world and, especially, changing human behaviour. School mission is to educate individuals so that, in contextual approach, it aims to build to the young people the ability to objectively analyse the current situations, to reason and to imagine necessary changes when confronted with problems. The foreign language classes on specific purposes constitute a convenient environment to achieve education for sustainable development. Our work turns to good account the experience gained from personal teaching activities with the students in 1st and 2nd years from the Agricultural University of Iasi, in French language seminars. The practical activity is supported by theoretical and methodological works that deal with the education for the sustainable development from multiple angles. By using various but additional resources and didactic strategies (authentic documents, on text and video format, group work, research of information on the internet, evaluation forms etc..), the activity we carried on allowed us to develop not only linguistic skills of the students, but also to provide objective marks, scientifically grounded, for the problematization and the reevaluation of the link between the individual-society and the environment; this paper focuses on discussing the civilizational formative component of the didactic process in French classes for specific purposes.