Academic literacy, genres and competences: a didactic model for teaching English to translation students

• Published in: ELIA no. 17; pp. 251 - 272
• Main Authors: Liendo, Paula J., Massi, María P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sevilla Universidad de Sevilla, Departamento de Lengua Inglesa 2017
• Subjects: Academic discourse; Academic language; Curricula; Digital media; Educational Policy; English for special purposes; Language Acquisition; Literacy; Metacognition; Negotiation; Second Languages; Syntax; Teaching; Text analysis; Translation instruction; Translation methods and strategies; New York; United States > US; Argentina
• ISSN: 1576-5059; 2253-8283
• DOI: 10.12795/elia.2017.i17.11

Academic literacy has been the subject of many publications in the last decade. Yet, the practices to develop it still need to be carefully contextualised, in accordance with the field of studies, the academic context, and even the language in which they are to be implemented. The aim of this work is to develop a didactic model that caters for the needs of (mainly advanced) students of a Certified Translation course. Achieving an acceptable standard of academic literacy involves linguistic and extra-linguistic -discursive, sociocultural, metacognitive- competences, together with translation competence. Additionally, the study of English from a contrastive perspective -regarded as a problemsolving task and applied at the lexical, syntactic, textual and sociocultural levels- is deemed unavoidable. This didactic model has an ESP (English for Specific purposes) and textual approach. The approach suggested for the implementation of this model includes metacognitive and metalinguistic reflection, cognitive and linguistic recognition and production, text analysis, design and assessment, discussion, negotiation, and social interaction.