Teaching writing of scientific abstracts in English: CLIL methodology in an integrated English and Medicine course

Abstract

In the I Faculty at the University of Rome �La Sapienza� Medical School, one of the several methodology courses aims at developing approaches by physicians to patient queries. One such course comprises several disciplines: Pathology, Immunology, Medical Statistics, Internal Medicine and English, with the specific aim of furnishing students, all Italian speakers, with skills for searching and evaluating the medical literature for answers to patient queries regarding risks and effectiveness of therapy. This paper describes the integration of English into a Methodology Course and delineates how the language component uses a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach to train students to write the highly specific genre of journal abstracts for medical experimental research articles. A corpus of student writing is presented and discussed with the aim of furnishing one didactic model for language teaching within the Italian Medical Curriculum.