Self-assessment checklists in medical CLIL

This article reports the first preliminary steps in the creation of personal self-assessment checklists for students enrolled in biomedical degrees. The checklist under construction has to do with awareness raising. Specifically, it is designed to provide a much-needed integration for, and, in part, correction to students’ beliefs about the CEFR system, re-orienting them towards GMER and OCSE goals. Except in rare cases, students enrolling in this degree in Italian universities are familiar with CEFR and its A1-C2 scale. Indeed, many of them possess an international CEFR-based certificate attesting their level of competence on this scale. They are, on the contrary, generally unaware that their degree course requires a knowledge and use of English that goes beyond the basic lexicogrammatical framework acquired during their school years and demands a focus on specialised meaning-making practices and highly-contextualised vocational skills. This entails the need to take a further step which often comes as a cultural shock for many students who have a hard time adjusting to a new set of expectations, having assumed, more or less, that what they already knew would suffice with, perhaps, some “touch-ups” in lexis whereas, as a matter of fact, getting to grips with biomedical texts requires much more than this. The process of adjusting to the requirements of discourse in English in such texts presupposes guidance and a set of support tools that include self- assessment checklists that allow students to monitor their progress for themselves.