Audrey Renson, winner of one of the 2024 Philippe Maystadt Prize

Audrey Renson, a lecturer in English at the Institut Supérieur des Langues Vivantes (ISLV) at the University of Liège, is the winner of one of the Philippe Maystadt Prizes awarded by ARES for her doctoral thesis on how to increase the effectiveness of foreign language teaching in secondary education.

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udrey Renson graduated in didactic modern languages and literature (English/Italian) in 2015, and then worked as an English and Italian teacher for just over three years in various establishments in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (secondary and higher education). In January 2019 she was awarded a doctoral scholarship to carry out a research project on the teaching of debate. 

Her thesis, entitled "Le débat de société public régulé en langue étrangère en Belgique francophone. État des lieux sur les pratiques déclarées et expérimentation d'un enseignement explicite vs implicite du genre" (Regulated public debate in foreign languages in French-speaking Belgium. An overview of declared practices and experimentation with explicit vs. implicit gender teaching) examines foreign language teaching in French-speaking Belgium, focusing on the regulated public debate (DSPR) in English classes in upper secondary education. The initial survey reveals a lack of specific tools and training to help teach textual genres despite their frequent use in the classroom. Audrey Renson, therefore, proposes to fill these gaps and compare two approaches to move towards greater effectiveness in the foreign language classroom. The experiment conducted with secondary schools shows that explicit teaching of the DSPR is more effective than implicit teaching and offers added value for foreign language learning. The conclusion suggests ways of integrating the DSPR more effectively into foreign language teaching in FW-B. These include a project for an initial and in-service training course based on the explicit teaching of DSPR that can be transposed to other textual genres such as job interviews, covering letters, etc. Audrey Renson was awarded one of the Prix Philippe Maystadt 2024 for her doctoral work.

After completing a post-doctorate at the University of Geneva, Audrey returned to Liège and is now a lecturer in English at the Institut supérieur des langues vivantes (ISLV) and an assistant in the modern language teaching department at the University of Liège.

Read a summary of Audrey Renson's thesis on ORBi

About the Philippe Maystadt Prize 

The Philippe Maystadt Prize is awarded to the best final-year, bachelor's, master's and doctoral dissertations by students in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (Belgium), covering the various dimensions of education, with a particular focus on higher education and its three missions (teaching, research and service to society), based on a forward-looking or innovative approach likely to have an impact on education in general, with the potential to be transposed to the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.