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 Vol.8 

Teaching Strategy for Interdisciplinary Professional French: The Case of Supplementary Reading Training Activity in political-economic Course


Author
Chung-Heng Shen
Synopsis

The education task of a Department of French usually consists of basic language training, however, language ability is considered to be a fundamental and major intellectual capacity of a student, and students of Department of French should be capable of reading French texts from a great variety of discipline, which is a basic competence of language-major students. The Department of French of Fu Jen Catholic University provides a course named 'French political and economic news reading'. The objective of this course is to equip students with professional language competence in political field. Professional political knowledge concerning the fifth Republic in France is instructed through ordinary program, whereas news reading and translating work is introduced as supplementary teaching activity, their professional reading capacity is enhanced, they can also observe important political and social events in modern French society. With articles of various subjects from different media, students are trained to read texts of different styles, and their comprehension is evaluated by their translation work. From the perspective of ”French for specific purposes”, this article put these translation works through analysis in order to discover difficulty of comprehension, including linguistic related difficulties and those dues to lack of professional knowledge or professional French. Conventional ”French for specific purposes” aims at French training for learners from others professions or disciplines, but as a matter of fact, French teaching unit should also design special ”French for specific purposes” for students major in French, so that students specialized in language could enlarge their learning scope, their French major would be combined with other professional knowledge, and at the end application as well as usability of French would be largely enhanced.