OVERVIEW

The Department of Pharmacy considers the knowledge of English to be crucial for the education of students enrolled in their degree courses. Therefore it organises a Scientific English course (intermediate-advanced level) open to first year CTF and third year Pharmacy students, held by a mother-tongue Teacher. Even if students have a good grasp of English, they are advised to attend the course.

AIMS AND CONTENT

LEARNING OUTCOMES

The capacity to express oneself in English at a B2 level of the CEFR in the various registers of spoken, written and multimodal discourse; metalinguistic analysis of multimodal English texts with reference to the phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical and pragmatic structures; methodological studies aimed at the practice of and reflection on translation, written and oral, from English to Italian in its non literary applications and in its multimedia applications.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course offers an in-depth reflection on the micro and macrostructures, as well as the micro and macro-skills, typical of scientific English.

The main goal is for students to develop accuracy in using microstructures, understood as the morphosyntactic structures commonly taught in school settings, such as:

• the verbal system, with particular focus on verb aspect;

• the role of verbs, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions in various sentence types (affirmative, negative, interrogative, modal, subordinate, temporal, concessive, consecutive, conditional, dubitative, passive, impersonal, infinitive, and hypothetical constructions).

Mastery of these elements forms the basis for dealing with the most frequent grammatical microstructures in scientific discourse, including:

1. Nominalisation: the use of nouns to express abstract processes and the resulting implications for negative, demonstrative (article usage), and interrogative constructions.

2. Modality: the role of the verb and other parts of speech in expressing opinions, possibility, probability, and hypothesis.

3. Quantification and the expression of statistical data.

4. Comparison.

5. Sequencing.

6. Use of acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations in medical-scientific discourse.

7. Deagentivisation, understood as the scientific language’s tendency to prefer syntactic constructions that obscure or eliminate the agent altogether (see, for reference, the entry on Michele A. Cortelazzo on the Accademia della Crusca website).

These features represent an essential step toward mastering more advanced communicative skills, such as:

• describing graphs,

• presenting case studies,

• summarising scientific articles,

• comparing data, etc.

Such skills are intrinsically linked to professional biomedical practice.

PREREQUISITES

Basic school-level English knowledge, with a recommended minimum level of B1.5 according to the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).

TEACHING METHODS

The lessons will be primarily frontal, aiming to be interactive as well, combining lecture and discussion, all in English. AulaWeb will be used to present key points of the lessons, provide additional materials, links to interesting websites, videos, and more. Further details about the use of online resources will be provided during the course.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

In addition to the revision of key morphosyntactic structures of scientific English, the course introduces topics related to professional practices in biomedical and pharmaceutical fields, both in national and international contexts, with a particular focus on communication and management systems.

Alongside work on linguistic microstructures and interactional micro-skills, students will explore a range of professional contexts and language uses relevant to the biomedical and pharmaceutical domains.

Particular emphasis is placed on reading comprehension, understood as the ability to grasp not only the literal meaning of a text, but also its implicit content, references, and logical inferences – aspects that can be particularly challenging in a foreign language.

To support this, the adopted textbook – The Medical Alphabet Vol. 2 – serves as a hybrid resource, combining reading passages with references to a wide selection of medical and pharmaceutical films. This multimedia approach supports the development of both written and oral specialised language competence.

As part of a continuous learning approach, the course will regularly revisit previously covered content. Independent revision by students plays a key role in consolidating knowledge and achieving more advanced levels of competence.

Regular practice – such as reading even just a few pages in English daily, watching short video materials, and completing exercises from the textbook – will help students develop long-lasting skills that will benefit them throughout their academic and professional careers.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Course book: Anna Loiacono (2018). The Medical Alphabet Volume 2. An English Textbook on Healthcare in the Digital Age. Matarrese Editore. Andria.

Bibiliography

Baldry, Anthony. Multimodal Web Genres: Exploring Scientific English. Como & Pavia: Ibis, 2011.

Baldry, Anthony, & Thibault, Paul. Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis. A Multimodal Toolkit and Coursebook. London, Equinox, [2006] 2010.

Anna Loiacono (2013). The Medical Alphabet Volume 1. An English textbook in healthcare. Matarrese editore. Andria.

LESSONS

LESSONS START

Lessons start in the second semester

Class schedule

The timetable for this course is available here: Portale EasyAcademy

EXAMS

EXAM DESCRIPTION

The course examination at the end of the second semester is an oral test worth 3 CFUs. 

The oral exams consists of two parts: a part entirely in English with the course teacher and a translation part with one of the exam commission members. The students' capacity to speak in English and their capacity to apply the main features of the textual models studied and used during the course will be evaluted by means of: 

a) the in-depth knowledge of a topic from the course book or dealt with during the course, chosen by the student; 

b) a generic talk about the course book and the lesson contents; 

c) the reading and translation of a scientifici text chosen by the members of the commission.

ASSESSMENT METHODS

The course test is designed to evaluate the students' understanding of the materials/contents presented during lessons and of the course book