Learning outcomes

Students are involved in the following didactic activites:
- consolidation of grammatical sturctures required at a B2/1 level (CEFR)
- recognition and use of high frequency lexical items in Health and Safety
- pronunciation of lexical items
- articulatation of hygiene and health and safety laws
- comprehension/translation of short texts
- dealing with common health and safety issues by means of case study investigation
- working collaboratively in small groups to carry out internet research
- roleply: interacting professionally in health and safety situations

Program

The course programme relies heavily on teacher-student and peer-to-peer interaction to stimulate the use of ESP (English for Special Purposes) related to Health and Safely in the Workplace. The teaching material for the frontal lectures is based on current studies and best practices in workplace and environmental health and safety, often downloaded/updated from the internet: these then become the benchmarks for students to further develop their language skills.

Lessons include the analysis and comprehension of specialised texts in order to recognise the grammatical,lexical and functional value of the linguistic components under investigation within a specific topic. Some Italian-English translation work is introduced to consolidate the latter processes. Topics include food safety, fire prevention, ISO certification, Personal Protective Clothing, Risk Assessment.

Students take part in teamwork and present an assigned case study or best practice in power point. The group presentation focuses on a detailed discussion of a specific Health and Saftey issue, possible preventive measures to deal with the associated problems, and eventual interaction with the public and/or public administrative bodies.

Examination Methods

The exam is made up of two parts, oral and written.
The oral requires the power point presentation of a Health and Safety case study or best practice assigned by the lecturer. Although carried out in a group, made up of either three or maximum four members, the oral mark and resulting final assessment will depend on the individual student performance.
The written exam comprises a dictation/note-taking exercise, and various gap-fill type exercises with grammatical or lexical value related to selected Health and Safety topics.
The final result is the average obtained from the abovementioned test components.