First term

From 21 October 2025 to 05 December 2025 (7 weeks - 14 hours)

Second term

From 12 January 2026 to 20 March 2026 (8 weeks -16 hours)

Third term

From 08 April 2026 to 15 May 2026 (5 weeks - 10 hours)

By the end of this course, you will have improved your ability to read academic texts in Italian in history, law, political and social sciences by recognizing their structural and logical features and the stylistic characteristics of their micro-languages.

Specifically, you will be able to:

· identify the underlying structure of the academic text in Italian, e.g. by analysing the keywords, key concepts, and relationships between parts of the text

· analyse the discipline-specific language of academic texts at different levels

· recognise (passive knowledge) the most frequent grammatical structures of different text types and understand their function

· deconstruct complex sentences in context

· understand a broad spectrum of specialistic vocabulary

The coursework focuses on teaching you to recognise the form and understand the function of the structures that underpin written text; you are not expected to use these structures actively (speaking and writing).

Some linguistic structures typical of academic texts:

· impersonal form

· past tenses: passato remoto/ imperfetto/ trapassato prossimo (the past perfect)

· the passive form

· the function of the gerund in causal, time and modal sentences

· connectors: conjunctions, pronouns, and expressions which connect the parts of academic texts

· complex sentences

Specialist vocabulary

· Lexical collocations, typical of the academic micro-languages

· Frequent prefixes and suffixes

· Synonyms and antonyms

· Nominalisation

· Figurative expressions

· General and specific reading strategies in a foreign language to facilitate the global comprehension of a text

· Comprehension strategies between languages

· Meta-cognitive strategies

· Individualised course materials: During the course, we will also work on samples of different academic texts, which will be selected according to the participants’ field of research.