Entre compétence et performance: concilier la préparation des évaluations standardisées et l’apprentissage de la langue usuelle. Une étude de cas : les élèves-ingénieurs et le TOEIC.

Taking the TOEIC: From Linguistic to Communication Competence.

The CTI (Commission des Titres d’Ingénieur), the organization responsible for the accreditation of French engineering schools, affirms in its « References and Orientations » (2015) that one of the major objectives targeted by Engineering Schools lies in the acquisition of the skills necessary to participate in or manage international projects. As a result, the prescribed TOEIC score of 785/990 (B2) is a prerequisite and, consequently, a considerable obstacle to obtaining an engineering degree. However, INSA-Strasbourg pursues a policy based on the democratization of education and refuses to exclude a linguistic selection to admit candidates with the best record in mathematics and science. Instead of rejecting a talented engineering student, they assume that he will be able to fill his linguistic lacunae once selected through internships, international exchanges, and language courses, which are part of the three to five year curriculum for a Master’s of Science degree. In view of the basic data available, the implementation of this strategy is, at the very least subject to discussion, in particular concerning the pupils who are weakest in English.

Our study sets out to explore why between 30 to 50% of students at INSA-Strasbourg persist in maintaining an approach to learning English that leads to failure when attempting to take the TOEIC. It was necessary to analyze the quantitative data available at this highly selective engineering school to identify possible structural characteristics. Furthermore, subjects were interviewed before and after the TOEIC based on a pretest to explain their success or lack thereof regarding SLA in general and the TOEIC. In doing so, it was necessary to shed light on their feelings about long years of unsuccessful language learning. They maintain a quasi-traumatic relationship with a language, the mastery of which has become crucial for the development of their international career and yet remains, to this day, anecdotal for the validation of their coursework. It was, therefore, also important to analyze their attributions with a mixed methodology based on theoretical concepts from the psychology of control (Paquet, 2009). They were given questionnaires based on general self-efficacy (Bandura et al., 1966; Schwarzer et al., 1999), locus of control (Rotter, 1966, 1990), coping competence (Schroder, 2004; Schroder & Ollis, 2013), and the norm of internality (Beauvois & Dubois, 2009; Dubois, 1994; Jellison & Green, 1981; Pansu et al., 2008).  In their interviews, students were invited to identify the limits of their usual approach to language learning and to imagine possible alternatives using concepts from learned helplessness (Seligman, 1992) and technics such as films from autoconfrontation croisée (Clot, 2008).  The subjects unabashedly described their role as language learners, and their responses constitute the qualitative data of this thesis, which is used to complete the quantitative data and find a bridge linking their assertions and their results on the TOEIC.

La soutenance n’est pas publique, en raison de la situation sanitaire.