Pixel International Conferences

In the field of educational studies, little attention has been paid to the analysis of knowledge formation enabling teachers to carry out their pedagogical work. Indeed, knowledge formation is associated with degree contents chosen as a specialty, which then lays at the basis of course content and teachers’professional competence. However, when it comes to languages for specific purposes (or LSPs), the sources and methods of knowledge formation must also encompass the topics that normally accompany the teaching of language skills. Most LSP teachers are not educated in scientific, legal or otherwise professional knowledge they use as subject matters in their language classes and ‘borrow’ from experts in those fields. The present contribution aims to trace the origins of such a knowledge, define it and assess how it consolidates into a crucial aspect of teacher development in LSP teaching in higher education, based on an ongoing research project involving LSP in a French university. Taking into account the dearth of academic literature around the issue of teachers’ knowledge formation, some exploratory and qualitative inquiries were carried out within different departments of the University of Toulouse, involving different LSP areas, based on group discussion and discourse analysis. The results should serve as the basis for a more thorough investigation at regional or national level involving more quantitative tools. One of the expected outcomes of this research is also to show that it may somehow collide with professional attitudes and received knowledge about the legitimacy  that goes along with teaching in higher education and how it may question teachers’ relation with academic knowledge.