A professionalising approach for students in computer science

Preparing our computer students for professional life consists in establishing a link between lessons taught in the DUT Informatique and tasks that will be assigned to them in the workplace. It is then up to the language teacher to determine which activities are to be performed in English and what kind of skills are necessary to complete them. To this end, a needs analysis was carried out in computing firms in order to adapt our teaching to the real working environment of programmers. We opted for a skill-based method and put into practice the precepts of the action-oriented approach which recommends making school tasks match professional activities in a foreign language. Students were asked to read and understand technical documentations in English to enable them to write lines of code, as they do in their practical sessions on programming. This paper offers food for thought and feedback on this professionalising approach.