Fachsprachen konstruieren: Kurskonzept für eine mehrsprachige Universität in Italien. TEIL II.

Abstract

In this paper the authors aim to show how theory and practice are interlinked in planning an LSP language course. It is the result of a project conducted at a trilingual university in Italy over 1,5 years. In the first part of the paper the theoretical impact will be discussed. The second part of the paper shows an example of a teaching exercise. Even though the authors describe the course concept by starting with the more theoretical impact and coming then to the practical one, both aspects are seen as one. The authors see themselves as teachers and researcher, and aim to show how important it is to define theoretical aspects of practice on the one hand and to study theory from a practice-oriented point of view on the other. It is part of the job of a teacher/researcher to continuously discuss how both are intertwined. In this practical part of the paper, the authors analyze an example taken from an LSP-classroom situation. The subject is “Diritto privato”. The teaching exercise taken from the LSP-class is the so-called “Lingua Puzzle”, where students re-build a pre-fixed part of text. The group of students involved consists of German native speakers learning Italian as L2. The aim is to show how they build up their language and content knowledge. In order to underline decisive points of their construction process a control group of Italian mother tongue speakers and students of the same university were introduced. Their way of re-building the same text is completely different. Part 1 and Part 2 of this paper aim to motivate practitioners to re-think their practice critically and to stress the importance of theory. NB: The first part of this paper (Teil I) was published in LSP and Professional Communication, Volume 3, Number 1, April 2003