French at the FLT and the CEFR: Analysis of needs

Abstract

This article deals with the teaching of French as a foreign language in the College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University. It discusses the essential features of the programs, their methods and tools. It seeks to specify the students’ actual needs as well as the ways to achieve them, with the aim of improving the methods employed and the tools used in these programs in order to achieve a better educational yield.

To achieve the above stated goals, the study has designed a general a survey to solicit, as objectively as possible, the evaluation of the teaching staff and the students, of both sexes, for specific and essential features of the program such as, the teaching plans and curricula distribution. Considering the researcher’s long involvement in teaching in the program, and after consulting many scientific studies on the subject, the article concludes with certain recommendation that advises an extensive revision of the teaching plan to bring it closer to the standards established by the European Union (CERC): the tools employed in the European Union, to mention one example, join or separate the different skills according to the levels.