Theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the construction and the evaluation of a LANSOD (LANguage for Specialist of Other Disciplines) course in a French musicology undergraduate programme
Résumé
90% of French students enrolled in higher education are taught foreign languages in LANSOD (LANguage for Specialist of Other Disciplines)
courses (Causa & Derivry-Plard 2013: 91). The LANSOD sector is “in full transition” (Braud et al. 2015: 59) and there are repeated calls for
researchers to explore the theories and methodologies underpinning these training courses as well as to assess the efficacy of the programmes. In
the arts and humanities especially, learner needs and the objectives of training courses are often ill-defined (Belan 2015; Brantley 2015; Sarré &
Whyte 2016). We set up and evaluated a LANSOD training course in the undergraduate programme of musicology at the University of Lille SHS
(France) over two years, consisting in a blended course with fairly specialised content. According to criteria such as self-reported levels of
satisfaction and motivation and attendance rate, the course yielded positive results. In our presentation, we will show how understanding the
LANSOD course as a complex dynamic system first helped us define our research object. Second, it led us to adopt specific methodological tools
such as modelisation and engineering evaluation methods. Finally, we will describe how these tools helped a) characterize the pre-existing learning
environment, b) identify the objectives of a new course and the means to attain these, and c) guide the evaluation process.