The challenges of teaching English for Economics, with pluralist theories and fuzzy boundaries

This report describes both the objectives and the contents of the English for economics course that Nadeera Rajapakse taught for twelve years at Université Paris 2 Panthéon Assas within the first year of the Master's degree. She mentions her questioning in relation to contents and the challenge she had to face in gathering her corpus of authentic documents in designing this course. Along with the social sciences, i.e. sociology or psychology, economic research is often based on quantitative studies. Qualitative research is also developed and the author draws our attention to the relevance of looking for alternative sources, focusing on a corpus of writings by heterodox economists with the objective of selecting texts representative of critical thinking today, in both macro- and micro-economics. The detailed syllabus of the course is depicted in the appendices. The aim of her English for economics course is to help students reach the CEF C1 level in English, through various language activities. The skills she focuses on are those linked to the students' immediate needs as they are going to enter the job market at junior level position: CV and job interviews, communication skills in a professional setting, oral interaction skills (notably Q&A), and technical writing. In the section of the paper devoted to course design, she goes over some of the specific tasks she conceived to help students reach their learning objectives. Finally, her account of this teaching experience deals with the implementation of the course, and highlights the key issue of flipped teaching, group work and mixed communicative and cooperative techniques. (Séverine Wozniak)