According to Anne Collard, project manager at UNamur, "LEA was born out of an observation shared by higher education institutions and validated by scientific studies: poor mastery of communication codes has a direct impact on student success, whatever their field of study. From literary streams to the sciences, many teachers report that their students have difficulty understanding a scientific article, exam instructions or even writing a formal email." The transition from secondary to higher education does indeed impose new demands on students in terms of academic reading and writing. "It's not just a question of grammar or spelling, but of an ability to adjust to a specific type of communication, unique to university, to understand its access codes. ", explains Anne Collard.
Concretely, the LEA scheme is based on four online courses freely accessible via WebCampus, the internal platform for UNamur students. These courses are designed to enable them to strengthen their skills in academic French in an autonomous and personalized way.
One of the main challenges lies in motivating students to commit to this training, especially as these courses are non-credit courses. To meet this challenge, the University of Namur is working to integrate LEA into existing curricula and adapt it to the specific features of each faculty. "My job is to inform the pedagogical coordinators of the various faculties and support them in adapting LEA to the realities of each discipline," Anne Collard points out. A first conclusive experiment took place in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, where LEA was integrated into a general philosophy course involving 300 Block 1 students."For half an hour, students worked online on a course of activities directly linked to the course. The challenge was to make them aware, a few weeks before the blockade, of the fine and strategic reading of an exam question which, by its very nature, deals as much with a part of the subject as with a particular task. In the students' opinion, this session generated far more interest than decontextualized advice, she explains.
The long-term aim is to roll out LEA to all faculties, including those that are not "literary". "I recently presented LEA to the Faculty of Computer Science, which confirmed that, even in more technical disciplines, mastering the codes of written communication in French is not only a success factor but an asset in the professional world. "
