Using discipline-specific texts in Italian universities: a modified ESAP approach

This paper sets out to describe and exemplify an approach to teaching reading skills on an English for Academic Purposes course at the tertiary level of the Italian higher education system. We intend to discuss some of the theoretical and practical implications of the teaching/learning environment and then outline the suggested approach with some examples of activities. We intend to argue for the use of authentic, discipline-specific texts as the fundamental element of the approach. The examples of activities will be taken from materials created for first degree courses in Economics and Business and masters’ courses in International Cooperation. We argue that learning involves changing and adapting to new ways of understanding, interpreting and organizing knowledge and the discipline-specific literary practices “constitute central processes through which students learn new subjects and develop their knowledge about new areas of study” (Lea and Street in Hyland 2006:119). Therefore, learning about a specific academic discipline, implies that students need to learn how to access and use the specialised discourses typical to that discipline. “The key concepts of a discipline, its methods of persuasion, its ways of negotiating interpretations and its practices of constructing knowledge are all defined through and by language” (Hyland 2006:38). Each discipline is likely to have more than one genre or sub-genre of discourse, for example academic papers, lecture notes, magazines and websites and some degree courses are modular, or entail options which cover different discipline areas and so have different communicative practices which encode the information and values of the discipline. For example a degree in Economics for Tourism will involve, statistics, mathematics, law, the history of economic thought and two foreign languages. So between disciplines and within each single academic discipline there are differences in the way information is encoded and communicated requiring students to “switch (literary) practices between one setting and another” (Hyland 2006:22).