Le développement de la compétence interculturelle dans l’enseignement du français professionnel à l’université
Developing intercultural competence in teaching French for professional purposes at university

Summary/Abstract: Our study investigates an essential problem related to university teaching, namely continuous adaptation to the labour market standards and requirements, which at the curriculum level involves a correlation between learning objectives and competency profile requested and expected in the professional world. With respect to foreign language teaching for professional purposes, this correlation implies, among other things, the integration of intercultural dimension in the contents taught in order to provide the student with necessary skills and enabling him/her able to efficiently (inter)act in today’s multicultural labour market, and finally meet the needs of contemporary world. In this context, our research firstly offers a theoretical approach to the concepts of culture and interculturel, which are envisaged as landmarks in today’s foreign language teaching philosophy and which specify, through their specific objectives to be achieved, new standards that foreign language teaching must comply with. Our study also offers a theoretical framework to the particularities of foreign language teaching for professional purposes. This enables us to reformulate the initial objectives associated to foreign language for professional purposes by integrating the objectives related to the development of intercultural competence. Finally, this study also proposes a concrete course content of medical French based on the course already delivered to the students studying medicine in Dunarea de Jos University of Galati. The course has been remodelled so as to meet the objectives of intercultural competence. In doing so, we firstly analysed the topics included in the course content with respect to aspects related to culture or intercultural communication, and afterwards we provided a list of cultural- and intercultural communicationoriented topics that could be articulated around the already proposed content of a French course for medicine. This proposal is also accompanied by a series of methodological recommendations that should be taken into consideration prior to designing a course for medical French.

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