Students’ Written and Spoken Technical Lexis in a Scientific English Course

In the present global context, English has by now become the vehicle of transmission of scientificknowledge in terms of both papers and presentations at international conventions, where an adequate knowledge of English by professionals is also a question of face. The present study aims at analyzing the technical lexis (written and oral) produced by students in a course in scientific English in a faculty of medicine in Italy. The corpus of analysis includes 17 PowerPoint (PPT) presentations and accompanying audio recordings of the students’ spoken English in order to analyze the presence of technical lexis and its correct spelling and pronunciation. The results show how pervasive technical lexis is in PPTs and how few serious difficulties there are in its spelling (given the international nature of cognates from Latin and Greek), but how many difficulties in pronunciation exist for native Italians (maybe due to the lack of correspondence between graphemes and phonemes in English). In light of these findings, EST courses should focus considerably more on pronunciation skills rather than, as presently occurs, mostly on reading comprehension skills.