Foreign Language Policy in Algeria and Teacher Professionalism Laboratoire

Foreign Language Policy in Algeria and Teacher Professionalism (FLPATP) as a research laboratory, since its creation in 2014, aims to cover the different dimensions of the field of foreign language teaching including teacher social involvement, teacher training, foreign language studies and translation, and even sociolinguistic studies and language contact.

FLPATP laboratory attempts to cover the following themes and axes of research:

1. Teacher Social Involvement

The aim of this team is to assist new teachers to be involved in society and not be confined to school or university only. It has also the duty to enable new teachers guide their students to integrate the learning, society and meaning and be active in class and totally tuned to society, and not be cut from it. In addition, the team aims at reinforcing the teaching competences. It helps novice teachers gather working routines and organize their sequence of ideas and know their freedoms and restraints and also helps them find fresh ways of inciting and motivating learners to take an active part in learning, and not passive recipients of the knowledge of the teacher. A better knowledge of the students and their learning abilities will also be provided to the new inexperienced teachers and train them on the methods of knowing their students.

2. Teacher Continuing Studies

The Teacher Continuing Studies' team takes on its shoulders the task of training teachers, old and new, on the methods and strategies of assuming continuous updating of knowledge by guiding them through reading and even encouraging them to further their studies to be up- to- date and acquire new contents, methods, strategies and goals of the language policy pursued by the Algerian authorities and even abroad for inspiration and comparison. Self-evaluation would be a motto for the teachers under the team's supervision that would guide them to further research and studies for achieving adequate competencies in their respective subjects. The teachers will be trained on how to plan their lessons and organize their activities and develop their sequence of ideas.

3. Teacher Training Programmes

The Teacher Training Programmes' team will have the duty to train inexperienced teachers to have continuous learning and acquisition of the new contents and teaching skills and methods to be able to adapt them to new realities and expectations of the learners and their society. It will also equip them with policies, procedures and skills to perform good quality teaching in the classroom, have the appropriate conduct at school and an active integration of society at large.This will be a training based on the needs of society where theory is applied to practice. In this programme, candidate teachers and practicing ones build competencies to face new situations such as problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity.

4. Sociolinguistic Studies and Language Contact

The Sociolinguistic studies and language contact team will undertake studies about language in society shedding light on sociolinguistic variation in general in an attempt to exhibit the correlation between linguistic variables and social factors at one hand, and on the interplay between languages exposing the different phenomena that may rise in language contact settings and situations in Algerian speech communities on the other hand. It will also investigate language in relationship with culture and social media.

5. Language Teaching and Translation Studies

Language Teaching and Translation Studies' research team essentially aims at investigating the tightly correlation existing between language teaching as both a linguistic and socio-cultural parameter and translation studies as a new perspective exploring the insights and different properties of languages in general, and languages of particular field of specialism. Therefore, most of the reseach works conducted at this level will mainly be articulated around the idea of how to set a general framework within which language teaching and translation studies would meet to better understand how they can contribute towards each other as a hybrid discipline that would unveil the necessary mechanisms and technicalities to foster our understanding of languages and how they interplay.