French for specific purpose: Reflections and practices in a course for students from the fi eld of Linguistics

Abstract

The teaching of foreign languages (FL), as well as FL teaching for specific purposes, has been innovating and incorporating new challenges. In this article, we expose some aspects of reading in a foreign language, in French for specific purpose (FOS) and we present a course, which was designed to meet the demands of a public university students in the countryside of São Paulo. The course was developed in four main steps – (i) demand, (ii) requirements analysis, (iii) data gathering, and (iv) development of the program and teaching materials – and the group was formed by students of Literature and Linguistics as target audience. We will also present data analysis and observations collected during the course. The academic reading course in French for specific purposes was based on the idea that reading comprehension – one of the skills of student readers – activates a body of knowledge articulated/motivated by the individual and by group interaction. This is in consonance with the premise of Richards, who postulates that reading involves more than a mere decoding of linguistic elements. We hoped that this work contribute with reflections on the teaching of French for specifi c purpose in academic context.

Keywords: French for specific purpose, academic reading, foreign language teaching, teaching French.