The second edition of the course Medical English Pronunciation: an Introduction starts on 28th October. After last year’s success and positive feedback, UniCamillus has decided to propose the workshop again, which is free of charge and aimed exclusively at UniCamillus tutors. The objective of the course is to teach how to identify peculiarities and nuances in the pronunciation of English words specific to the medical and scientific fields. “I’m very happy to see that my colleagues have been enthusiastic about the initiative throughout”, says a delighted Alessandro Rotatori, linguist, lexicographer and phonetician, director of the UniCamillus Language Centre (UCLC) and course convenor. “Knowing that some of my colleagues have personally asked the Rector to repeat this experience was a source of great satisfaction”.
UniCamillus, however, was already convinced of the importance of the course and the proposal to offer a second one was immediately approved. For a University that makes internationality its own trademark, it is indeed important to have a teaching staff that are adequately trained and constantly updated in the use of the most international of languages. “In general, in English, it is difficult for any non-native speaker to know the correct pronunciation of words, even the most common words or the ones you think you know”, explains Rotatori. “Sometimes you don’t expect a word to be pronounced the way it is. Even more so in the medical field, where the most frequently used words, technical terms and the most specific terms often have more than one possible pronunciation–which health care professionals should be able to recognise in speech”.
Spoken language is actually the biggest problem: “In medical English, most of the words have a Latin or Greek origin, similar to Italian. For this reason, the main problem is often not so much understanding the meaning or correct use of technical terms, but rather knowing how to pronounce them and, above all, being able to recognise them when they are pronounced by others rather than read from a text”. Indeed, there are many English words in the medical field whose spelling is similar, if not almost identical, to their Italian equivalents. And these are the ones that are often mispronounced: “Sometimes these words, which look familiar to us, have completely unexpected pronunciations. And this can lead to misunderstandings–perhaps when you’re speaking or explaining to an audience something that you have read in a scientific paper and understood well, but then, because of your mispronunciation, you’re unable to convey correctly”.
According to Rotatori, the problem is more widespread than you think and not just among Italians: “Sometimes even English native speakers–especially when it comes to more technical language–do not know how to pronounce words ‘correctly’. It happens that an ordinary person who does something else in life does not know how to pronounce a certain medical term, despite being a native speaker. This happens in other languages, too. In Italian, however, the problem is usually a misplacement of stress on a particular sylllable–which usually makes a word sound recognisable even though its pronunciation is ‘wrong’. In English, shifting the position of stress to a different syllable often radically changes the pronunciation of a word, making it sound almost unrecognisable”.
As far as this year’s course is concerned, the most important change is the increase in the number of classes. This will allow for more in-depth study of more specific topics. Those joining the course for the first time this year will spend a lot of time on theory, exploring as many new topics as possible. For those in the second year, the course will be essentially practical, offering plenty of time to work on what they learnt in the previous edition.