Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

In recent years, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have become a regular part of everyday English Language Teaching (ELT) practices in higher education and are merging with face-to-face activities. A hybrid modality, defined as Blended Learning (BL) (Sharma and Barrett 2007), has become established practice in Italian universities. The advantages of BL have long been recognized, particularly in ESP instruction (Luzón, 2009; Arnó-Macía, 2012), whose overall objective is to adapt the language learning experience to the learners’ specific needs. ESP practitioners who have experimented with BL to deliver their university courses may have recognized in it an efficient way of meeting the students’ needs and offering them an original experience. Having learned the lesson of the Covid-19 pandemic, and since they will very likely continue to teach their courses in hybrid or blended modalities in the future, it is arguably essential that ESP practitioners explore the full potential of ICT tools and are brought to reflect on the issues pertaining to their use. This paper aims to contribute to a reflection on the use of ICT in English language teaching (ELT) in higher education. It draws on the author’s personal experience of designing a Blended Learning (BL) syllabus for an undergraduate English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course in Technical English at the Department of Sciences and Methods for Engineering (DISMI) of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in the academic year 2021/2022. It describes the syllabus design process, illustrating how ICT tools and particularly online resources were used to analyze target students’ needs and customize the syllabus for the Technical English course.

The Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) paradigm has recently emerged as a comprehensive approach that aims to bring together innova tive pedagogical proposals. This paper argues that pop culture materials such as telecinematic representations can purposefully be integrated into innovative GELT-oriented classroom practices. The use of this material can assist teachers in the double task of (i) raising the learners’ critical aware ness of sociolinguistic variation and problematizing the stereotypical image of monolithic English; (ii) shifting the focus of the ELT classroom from pre scriptive grammar and standard English towards fostering the learners’ receptive and communicative skills. This is a conceptual paper that gives several broad suggestions as to how to adopt pop culture materials into innovative GELT-oriented classroom practice and mentions a select few examples of said telecinematic representations.

This paper reports on a qualitative study investigating the opinions on English Medium Instruction (EMI) held by Italian students of an EMI Master’s degree programme of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Data for this study were elicited by means of semi-structured interviews and are taken from a larger ongoing doctoral research study of students’ attitudes towards English and its pedagogy that combines descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis. Respondents discussed EMI and Internationalisation at Home (IaH) in relation to a number of other topics, including: non-native speaker teacher (NNST)'s competence, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and multilingualism, students’ motivation, international students and teachers. Although the majority of the respondents expressed satisfaction with their learning experience, and they all revealed a positive attitude towards EMI, they were also unanimously critical of the communicative competence in English of the non-native speaker teachers (NNSTs) of the nonlanguage courses. Due to the limited number of instances reported, further research is needed to validate the results. Nevertheless, it is hoped that this paper may provide useful contribution to the task of leading to better-informed ways of integrating language and disciplinary content for the internationalisation of academic curricula.

African authors of English expression have experimented with self- and pre-emptive translation. African novels that foreground and narrate multilingualism in the English prose anticipate a characteristic of the born-translated novels of today’s globalized market of literature. As the realities of the circulation of “global” literature are governed by the same logics that, ever since the early days of postcolonial literature, have prevented the development of a market for the circulation of African literature in African languages, writing in English represents a near-necessary choice for the African writers of the former British colonies. Through the born-translated novel in English, African authors have explored ways of mediating between the need for authenticity and the demands of the publishing market. However, the appropriation of the colonial language has always been a controversial issue. Sparked off as a diatribe on the language of literature in the early 1960s, the African debate on language interrogates the social and political role of the writers and their art and thus transcends the domain of literature. Translation, in both its capacities of trans-cultural practice, and necessary condition for an expanded readership, is at the heart of this debate and plays a key role in defining a space of and for African literature. Against the background of the language debate, summarized by the opposing stances of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, this paper discusses different approaches to the representation of Africa in and through the English language. Reference is made to Achebe’s African Trilogy novels, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation. The three authors here considered operated in different contexts and represent each a different conception of literature.