Learning foreign language for specific purposes in terms of professional competency development: proposal for a french training programme for students in life sciences

Abstract

Our paper is the result of twenty years of reflection and of teaching French to students in life sciences. This career path has given rise to several key concepts, namely specialized French as a teaching trend in didactics and, in training engineering, the construction of course progression, the objectives pursued and the profiling of exercises to ensure the development of learners' professional skills. The first part of our paper is of a didactic nature: it looks at the ideas that have marked the field of teaching French as a foreign language to professional audiences or those in the process of becoming professional, and also makes reference, where appropriate, to what has happened in the teaching of English. The aim of this part is not to draw up an exhaustive picture of the different methodologies, but rather to highlight the overall movement in this field of study. The second part is more practical and comes under the heading of training engineering, by proposing a specialized language teaching pathway, our point of view being, following Florence Mourlhon-Dallies’ approach (Enseigner une langue à des fins professionnelles, 2008), that there is no one methodology that is better than another, but that it is all a question of project, audience and priority.