Medical CLIL (Part I): How a medical degree works

Mediacy and CLIL are thus two rising curricular stars whose fortunes will inevitably interact with ESP in years to come. Requests for clarification found in online forums of the type: “Please can someone clarify the difference, if any, between CLIL and ESP” are demonstrations of the fact that, however different conceptually, their destinies are intertwined. Perhaps somewhat ironically, mediacy and mediacy support systems help to bring home the point that CLIL, medical CLIL in particular, has the explicit goal of teaching a subject through a foreign language but the implicit goal of teaching various aspects of applied linguistics such as sociosemiotic aspects of language education, discourse, text and intercultural analysis through an insegnamento i.e. a curricular subject. Within the broader vision of mediacy studies infused and inspired by linguistics and social semiotics theory, the activities of collaborative searching, corpora construction and text critiquing are part of a sharing context, in which language learning takes on a special and heartfelt quality. All this gives medical CLIL its own unmistakable identity.