English (2005/2006)

Learning outcomes

The course aims at improving the students’ ability to read and analyse psycho-pedagogical and sociological texts in English; hence, students will be helped to understand texts that exhibit terms, phrases, syntactic structures and textual features typical of Psychology, Education and Sociology.

1. Analysis of texts drawn from updated sources (mostly scientific journals and textbooks); the following topics will receives special attention:
- behaviour;
- deficit and handicap;
- emotions;
- growing up;
- development of the concept of `culture’;
- teacher training;
- groups and social relationships;
- the working context;
- assessment and evaluation.

2. analysis of English TV programmes dealing with psychological, educational or sociological aspects;

3. improvement of the students’ skills of understanding texts that exhibit terms, phrases, syntactic structures and textual features typical of Psychology, Education and Sociology.

4. illustration and evaluation of internet sites to be accessed in order to select:
a) updated articles and documents (pertaining to the fields of Psychology, Education and Sociology);
b) on-line dictionaries and grammar books;
c) further linguistic exercises.

5. explanation of the main phonetic symbols (IPA alphabet);

6. explanation of English word-formation rules, with special reference to the affixes most frequently exploited in the language of Education, SOciology and Psychology.

Written test divided into four sections:
1. `Contents and lexicon’
2. `Textual analysis’
3. `Phonetics’
4. `Morphology’

NB: Pre-requisites: B1 (intermediate) level of competence (according to the European framework).