92969 - English Language (Language B) For Interpreters

Learning outcomes

This course develops advanced English-language competence in contexts relevant to simultaneous and consecutive interpreting, with a focus on both linguistic analysis and cognitive-linguistic strategies. By the end of the course students will:

• Comprehend and produce oral discourse (and selected written texts) across diverse genres and communicative situations, especially those found in interpreting contexts.
• Demonstrate spontaneous, fluent, and accurate spoken English, particularly under cognitive pressure typical of real-time interpreting.
• Apply insights from applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and pragmatics to enhance comprehension, memory, reformulation, and delivery—core skills in interpreting.
  

Course contents

Topics include:

1. Lexico-grammatical structures in English: Their role in producing and comprehending English
2. Cognitive and linguistic processes (based on psycholinguistic models and cognitive linguistics).
3. Pragmatics and speech acts: Understanding and interpreting reference; informational structure; implicature, politeness, hedging, modality, and indirectness.
   
4. Performance-focused speaking activities: Summarising, paraphrasing, reformulating, adapting, debating, and presenting under time pressure.

Students will engage in:

• Close reading and critical analysis of authentic English texts and multimodal discourse.
• Oral summaries and on-the-spot reformulations of spoken and written content.
• Pronunciation, intonation, and prosodic control sessions informed by phonetic research.
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Readings/Bibliography

Required books:

 

Warren, P. (2014). Introducing Psycholinguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Recommended books

Gillies, A. (2024). Conference Interpreting. A student's practical book. Routledge

Hilpert, M. (2014). Construction Grammar and its application to English. Edinburgh University Press.

Culpeper, J., Kerswill, P., Wodak, R., McEnery, T., Katamba, F. (Eds.) (2018). English Language. Description, variation and context. Bloomsbury.

Additional texts (articles, multimedia) will be made available on the Virtuale platform during the course of the semester.

Teaching methods

Presentation of course content with multi-modal material and from different sources, content-related speaking activities: Presentations, real-time summarizing of audio-visual materials. 

Assessment methods

Midterm Presentation

5-minute oral summary + slides (max 2) of a chosen article (800–1000 words).  30% del voto finale del corso

Final presentation (10 minutes per presenter)

Group presentation (2-3 persone) on topics related to the course 

70%

Teaching tools

• Multimodal materials: ppts, texts from different sources (scientific journal articles, videos, transcripts)  

Office hours

See the website of Giulia Bencini