Secondo Ciclo Semestrale

Course content:

The course provides 6 CFUs for a total of 42 class hours.

The course content is organized around two interrelated goals:

i)             improving the students’ linguistic-communicative competence in English;

ii)            ii) developing subject-specific communicative skills related to the peculiarities of academic writing.

In accordance with these two objectives, the course includes two units of content:

1)         grammar consolidation (3 CFUs): revision of the basics of English grammar; word order and sentence structure; types of phrases and their functions; types of verbs (transitive, intransitive, linking verbs, modal verbs and modal auxiliary verbs); the predicative relationship and the different clause types; verb tense and aspect; modal verbs and their meaning (modalization of the sentence); sentence connectors and clause connectors;

2)         academic discourse (3 CFUs): a focus on the characteristics of academic writing. In the specific, the course presents the fundamentals of academic rhetoric in English, its stylistic conventions and specific vocabulary, and gives an overview of the different academic genres. Among these, particular attention is dedicated to the abstract and the essay.

Although described as distinct, the two units will not be covered in a liner fashion but in an iterative manner; whenever deemed necessary, the teacher will follow up on a grammar topic and any grammar-related issues that emerge from the class content and/or in response to the students’ requests.

Students will engage in the following activities:

-           reading comprehension: through reading selected writings in the humanities disciplines, students will improve their reading comprehension skills as well as their vocabulary;

-           text analysis: the analysis of academic rhetorical style and the study of target-specific vocabulary will be carried out also through the use of online corpus analysis and concordancing tools;

-           composition writing: by writing an essay, students will practice and improve their writing skills and apply the knowledge and skills acquired through the reading comprehension- and text analysis activities;