Journal of Languages for Specific Purposes (Mar 2020)
L’ENGAGEMENT DE L’ENSEIGNANT-CHERCHEUR EN ANGLAIS DE SPÉCIALITÉ : CAS D’UNE UNIVERSITÉ SCIENTIFIQUE / THE COMMITMENT OF RESEARCHERS IN ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: THE CASE OF A SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITY
Abstract
This preliminary research is based on the process of the researcher’s commitment. A series of data collected from professors of specialized English in a French scientific university will enable us to lay the foundations for research that is part of a more general approach: the foundations for an epistemology of specialized languages. This research consists in making a brief assessment of the representations of the practice of these professors in the field of science. First, we will analyze the regularities of teaching practices through the institutional constraints to which teachers have to comply with. The issue of the diversity of practices will be addressed to identify the leeway that professors have in research beyond the constraints (Roditi, 2003). We will see that between constraints and flexibility, there is the issue of commitment of the researcher of specialized English. This issue is rarely asked in the field of teaching English in courses other than English (e. g. law, science) and yet this question seems as fundamental as that of the content to be taught. The commitment of a language teacher in the teaching process appears to be an essential psychological and professional provision for the proper exercise of the teacher's profession. This issue relates to the epistemological reflection on specialized languages (Van der Yeught, 2014, 2016) which is still ongoing in France. Van der Yeught (2014) advocates basing LSPs on what constitutes their "central and stable core". This core could be the intersection between a language and a specialty field. The problem comes from the nature of one of the two elements of the intersection, namely the specialty that is mainly disciplinary or professional before being linguistic. Finally, we will see which research perspectives in specialized languages can be proposed following our research in specialized English in the field of ("hard") sciences: the construct of “English for science”.
