Moodle per la didattica

Monographic part (Modulo docente)

Throughout this course students will be engaged in reading activities (and discussions) of specialized and semi-specialized texts featuring terms, expressions, syntactic structures and discursive modalities frequently encountered in the domain of Education Studies (including that of pedagogy and psychology), and particularly Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). 

The specialized lexicon and terminology object of study will be extracted from the texts selected from classroom activities and for student self-study use. Texts will also be analyzed in their morpho-syntactic and lexical features.

The course is structured as follows:

2 CFU (14 hours) for the subject area of: “Perspectives on psychology and pedagogy” (selected texts).

2 CFU (14 hours) for the subject area of: “Landmarks in Education” (selected texts). 

2 CFU (14 hours) for the subject area of: “Issues in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)” (selected texts, news/journal articles, podcast transcripts).

Additions as well as minor changes to the course content are possible, in light of the students’ feedback and/or other contextual factors. Also, more time than originally planned can be dedicated to certain topics.

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;