Spare me the ‘lecteur’ – Part 1

I’m writing this on the bus into Oxford, as I get ready to start work once again. I’m very fortunate to have a summer job tutoring French students who are undertaking classes préparatoires, preparing for the concours to get into the grandes écoles such as the ENS and polytechnique. Having started this work last year and really enjoyed it, I jumped at the chance to undertake it again, and look forward to spending many hours teaching students the ins and outs of English grammar and style (as well as many more hours spent on the X40 bus in the mornings and evenings). Starting this job again, though, has led me to think about where I was this time last year: specifically, preparing to start my (now-completed) contract at the ENS de Lyon as a lecteur d’anglais. Over the next few blog posts, I’ll be talking a little more about this job, which I’ve referenced a few times without really explaining. Today’s post will be an overview of the ENS de Lyon as a whole, as well as what the role of a lecteur entails, while the following two posts will look in more detail at the courses that I offered to my students.

So, what exactly is a lecteur d’anglais? The term can cause some confusion, particularly as it has very little in common with the English word lecturer. In the British system, a lecturer is typically a professional academic, who will usually (as the term implies) give lectures on a given topic as well as undertaking some other teaching work and their own research. The job of a lecteur is an altogether different beast. My job, broadly defined, was to bring my students into contact with authentic English as it is actually spoken (‘actually’ both in the English sense, and in the French sense of ‘currently’!), giving them a chance to work on their spoken and written communication. This last point in particular was one of the most rewarding elements of the job, as I was able to watch students relax over the course of the year, learning to enjoy English lessons and to take pleasure in communicating in a foreign language. My hours (12 per week) and rate of pay (approximately €1,200 per month, after tax) were set by the French government, which technically oversees all lecteurs (as well as their primary- and secondary-school equivalents, the assistants de langue). From there, though, my task diverged somewhat from what a language teacher might be expected to do. Rather than teaching specialists in English the finer points of grammar and translation, I was actually employed to work exclusively with non-specialists, or students who were not preparing for the Master or the agrégation in English. Instead, I was part of the Centre de Langues, or Language Centre, whose public (audience) is students from across the ENS. Some were following a specific course designed to teach scientific communication, while others needed to complete a foreign language element as part of their master’s in other subjects. While my students were therefore not specialists in English, their levels of language skill ranged widely, from B1 to C1 on the European Language Framework (for people used to the English system, these equate very roughly to mid-level GCSE pass and second-year degree level respectively).

How in the world do you teach an audience that wide? Well, in another departure from the norm in France, the lecteurs at the ENS are given the liberty to design their own courses, so it was my responsibility to build ‘differentiation’ into my classes. In designing my courses, I attempted to provide students who may have been ‘turned off’ by the large class sizes at school level with an opportunity to re-engage with English, and tried to do this through that multifarious beast, ‘culture’. My classes, taught in a modular format across two terms, had both linguistic aims and broader ‘cultural’ ones, with the shared goal of allowing my students to become part of the English speech community.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. In my next post, I’ll talk a little more about the two courses that I devised and taught, before going into more detail about one specific module. And yes — I promise, medievalists — we will be returning to the thirteenth century.