HOW TO TRAIN TODAY THE TEACHERS OF FRENCH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE OF TOMORROW? (The example of an introductory and innovative course in language didactics)

International audience ; Training for language teaching profession is a challenge, where innovative practices and digital technology can bring benefits. In this article, we focus on the training of future teachers of French as a foreign language. We present an innovative teaching, mixing a flipped classroom and blended learning approach, for students following an introductory course in language didactics. The aim of this research is to understand how students perceive the language teaching profession before the course, and how they see their development of skills related to their future profession after attending the training. Our approach consists of a text analysis and qualitative analysis of declarative data from participants in this innovative scheme, before the course, and after the course, with a view to ascertaining their appreciation of the development of skills to become a language teacher. We collected the students' responses to surveys given before and after the course in the first semester of the academic year 2020/2021. The first survey, given before the course, dealt with the words associated with teaching, learning and class, as well as the definition of a good language course and the profession of FFL teacher. The second survey, given after the course, concerned the usefulness of the course for the professional objective and a self-evaluation of the skills developed. The analysis shows that the participants have a positive view of the teaching profession, but also describe it in a more traditional way. Results also show that most students felt that the course was useful for their professional life and that they developed several competences related to their definition of the profession. These results lead to the conclusion that these representations about FFL teachers have to be taken into account during the course, in order to make the students aware of the different facets of the profession.