Taking Genre to the LSP Learning Environments in Italian Higher Education

Taking Genre to the LSP Learning Environments in Higher Education Glen Michael Alessi UNIMORE -DCE Genre perspectives on LSP and building genre knowledge have been thought to be an important part of developing professional, institutional and critical literacies while encouraging the learning of and successfully participating in discursive practices across professional disciplines . The lecture hall and laboratories offer both advantages and disadvantages as academic settings for the introduction of genre analysis in LSP contexts. This paper intends to survey and critique current approaches to genre teaching and testing in the Italian university context and to propose alternative, lecture, language lab and blended-learning curriculums and activities which coordinate lecturing with applied laboratory activities. Existing practices of classic identification and analysis of genre moves and lexico-grammatical features, will be extended to real-world contexts which call for applying genre knowledge to solve problems in text-production or editing ( e.g. writing for the Web, translation, or public service notices ). This paper takes Hyland's definition of genres as 'abstract, socially recognised ways of using language'( Hyland, 2002a:114 ) , and attempts to operationalize that definition in the LSP lecturing, learning and teaching contexts in Italian university context . ( Nesi, Gardner 2012 )