TESOL France

TESOL France, in association with RANACLES, APLIUT and SAES, is pleased to present

The Great Debate

Is the current concours system (CAPES and Agrégation) the best method for selecting and preparing future English teachers in France?

Saturday March 29th 14:30 to 17:30
Télécom Paris (ENST), 49 rue Vergniaud, 75013 Paris. Lecture Hall: Thévenin

The event is free.

This event will take the form more of a bilingual French-English round table followed by interventions from guest speakers from the floor and ending with a question and answer session.

The event has two main objectives

To facilitate an exchange between different groups of interested parties, representing different points of view on the concours system;
To inform the public and to allow the audience to make a better informed judgement.

The event will be held in both French and English. Participants will be able to speak in the language of their choice.

The Panel members will include representatives of the education industry in France including:

Nigel Quayle -- current member of agrégation externe jury
Pierre Coatrieux -- who prepared the agrégation at Paris IV and went on to work in business, using English on a regular basis in a business context thus representing an employer's point of view
Marie-Annick Mattioli -- the president of APLIUT
Laurel Zuckerman -- the author of the recent "Sorbonne Confidential".
Alain Cazade -- the president of RANACLES
François Poirier -- the vice-president of SAES
The moderator will be Dennis Davy, a lecturer, teacher trainer and researcher at the University of London Institute in Paris.

Vera Dickman - head of the language department at ENST, will also lead a informative discussion on the background of the concours system.

In addition to the panel speakers, representatives of teaching associations will be speaking from the floor following a Panel-to-Representative discussion.

The final part of the event will be devoted to the Panel answering questions from the floor.

Role of the Organizers, Associates, and Panel Speakers

The organizers from TESOL France and their associates from APLIUT, RANACLES and SAES do not, and will not, take a position on the concours system. Mr. Quayle's views are in no way representative of the views of the agrégation externe jury. Their role is limited to facilitating the discussion and ensuring that the discussion is equitable and that all sides of the argument are equally represented.

Panel Speaker Biographies

Alain Cazade

Alain Cazade is a professor at the University of Paris Dauphine. He passed the CAPES and the Agrégation in English in 1974, and obtained a PhD in Contemporary Poetry (David Jones, Poet of the Revelation) from the Sorbonne in 1984 and a Habilitation to direct research (Research-Development in Language Multimedia Pedagogy). After directing the Training Centre for Computer Science Pedagogy at the Academy of Créteil at the University of Paris 13, he sold multimedia pedagogical language software: "Help Yourself" to the Ministry of Education. Author of a management tool: "Following Language Learners" and numerous publications (articles, reviews, etc), Alain Cazade was also a member of the CNU (Conseil National des Universités) for several years. As a specialist in language pedagogy, languages for specific purposes (LANSAD: Languages for Specialists of Other Disciplines), an analyst for corpora for specific purposes, he is involved in and is a member of several research centres including CERLACA and CICLaS at the University of Paris Dauphine in bringing together the DILTEC of University of Paris 3 Sorbonne. As the president of RANACLES, Mr. Cazade is also the joint director of the "Master of Languages for Specific Purposes" at the University of Bordeaux 2 - Dauphine, researcher and developer of multimedia pedagogical language materials, and designer and writer of the software for Windows: "Help Yourself."

Pierre Coatrieux

After taking a licence and maîtrise in English, Pierre Coatrieux studied for the CAPES and Agrégation d'anglais at the University of Paris Sorbonne. Instead of pursuing an academic career, he went on to take an accounting qualification and worked in several international companies, most recently Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young, where his clients were multinational companies with branches or subsidiaries in France. He now works as a Financial and Organizational Consultant advising companies looking to expand outside France.

Dennis Davy

Since 1993, Dennis Davy has been a lecturer, teacher trainer and researcher at the University of London Institute in Paris, formerly known as the British Institute in Paris. Dennis studied French and German at Oxford University, English Language Teaching at Lancaster and English and Applied Linguistics at Cambridge. His professional career in TEFL spans more than 25 years, teaching English and training teachers in Europe, the Far East, North Africa and the Middle East. His research interests include lexicology, language testing/evaluation, the teaching of spelling, the role of pop music in language learning, language teacher education and English for Special Purposes. Dennis has published articles on the British education system, lexical learning and word-formational processes in English, as well as running practical workshops on a wide variety of topics and giving lectures and papers at conferences and colloquia. His most recent paper, entitled "Comment évaluer la compétence lexicale ?", was presented at the Collège de France. He has worked on the editorial committee of the academic journal "Franco-British Studies" and was involved in the organisation of an international colloquium on Second Person Pronouns, hosted by the Forum des Langues Européennes à Paris.

Marie-Annick Mattioli

Since 2001 Marie-Annick Mattioli has been an active member of the APLIUT (association of language teachers in IUTs), of which she now is the president. She teaches English at the IUT Paris Descartes as a lecturer. Her research essentially concerns women on the job market in Britain and the introduction of the identity card in Britain (history + repercussions on ethnic as well as sexual minorities).

François Poirier

François Poirier was educated in Paris, graduated at the Sorbonne in 1968 and passed the "CAPES" in 1970 and the "agrégation" in 1971, which gave him a tenure as a secondary school teacher. Associated from its inception during the summer of 1968 with the experimental university of Vincennes (now Université Paris 8, in Saint-Denis), he was appointed lecturer there in 1976 and moved to a professorship at neighbouring Université Paris 13 in 1993. Though heavily involved in the organisation of European exchange programmes, he has published extensively in academic journals on issues related to British labour history and British politics, leading up to a book in 1992, Génération Thatcher � La culture politique de l'Angleterre, and to his habilitation thesis in 1993, Aspects de la conscience ouvrière en Angleterre depuis la Réforme de 1832. He has at the same time developed a comparative dimension so as to critically take into account the cultural bias of any national approach and contributed in France as well as in Britain to general publications on comparing the two countries (such as "La Grande-Bretagne et la France: un long face-à-face", pp. 35-110 in France Grande-Bretagne, Paris: Ministère des Affaires étrangères, April 1996 (2nd edn), 144 p.) or to more specific ones on social policy (such as "Liberty, Property and Community", pp. 77-89 in John EDWARDS et Jean-Paul REVAUGER (eds.), Discourse on Inequality in France and Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998, xii+208 p.) or politics (e.g. "General Election 1992: A French Republican View", pp. 669-682 in Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 45, n� 4, October 1992; "Le Parti travailliste britannique: grandeur et décadence", pp. 55-89 in Marc LAZAR (ed.), La Gauche en Europe depuis 1945. Invariants et mutations du socialisme européen, Paris: PUF, 1996, 704 p.).

Nigel Quayle

Professeur Des Universités
Ecole Centrale de Lille

After qualifying to teach and a period as a French teacher in secondary schools in the UK, Nigel Quayle worked his way up through the French system, first as a student and then as a teacher of the CAPES and the Agrégation d'anglais. He has sat on the jury for the CAPES externe and the Agrégation interne and is currently a member of the jury for the Agrégation externe.

Laurel Zuckerman

Laurel Zuckerman first became widely known after publication of her controversial French "docu-fiction" Sorbonne Confidential (Fayard, 2007), an account of an American trying to obtain the agrégation in order to become an English teacher in the French public education system. Juxtaposing statistics and anecdotes, Zuckerman explores the competitive exam industry and its impact on the teaching and learning of English in France. The book's wickedly comic portrait of the system has generated considerable debate.

Originally from Arizona, Zuckerman has a BA in "liberal arts" (phi beta kappa) and is a graduate of the HEC School of Management. After working for 18 years in logistics and information technology, she decided, like her fictional heroine Alice Wunderland, to try to become an English teacher by passing the agrégation d'anglais. Married, with two children in French public schools, Zuckerman lives in Bry-sur-Marne, France and is a member of the local city council. Her second book is slated to appear in French next October.

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages