The course aims at providing students with the necessary skills to organise coherently and logically some of the forms of communication used in scientific research, in the environmental science field in particular, such as abstracts and research articles to be submitted to international reviews/journals and presented at conferences.
In particular, students will be required to learn specialised scientific terminology, the specific morpho-syntactic structures of academic English for science, read and understand real scientific texts (research articles, abstracts etc.) and develop and apply specific strategies of academic writing.
The course will mainly focus on writing, reading and understanding, though the oral aspect of the language will be also touched upon. Students will have to: express agreement and disagreement on theses and hypotheses, explain and present results and data included in tables, describe their CV, research interests and future projects.
The skills required will have to satisfy the CEFR B2 level (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). To this end, students will be given access to an online course of exercises (listening comprehension, use of English, grammar, readings etc.) to support their study of the language.
Finally, particular emphasis will be placed on the consultation practice of specialist bibliographic material in the scientific field, databases, pronunciation dictionaries, online and print monolingual dictionaries, in order to adequately support autonomous study and develop the required skills.