Mediating Specialised Discourse in English | Domain: Marine sciences (2nd edition)
Academic Year
2026/2027
Course Aims
A course designed to develop participants' skills in mediating specialised knowledge for academic outreach contexts, with a focus on audience-aware communication to enhance knowledge transfer and accessibility.
Language taught
English
Workload
15h
Remote learning
Pre-requisites
B1 level CEFR
Target Group
Master’s and PhD students, lecturers, and researchers in marine sciences
Intended Learning Outcome
By the end of this course, participants should be able to activate discourse and language use strategies to mediate specialised vocabulary/terminology and phraseology, within the domain of marine sciences, according to audience and purpose.
The focus (of this 30-hour course) is on Amplifying strategies to clarify meaning and facilitate understanding.
Delivery mode
Fully online (synchronous sessions)
Specific learning outcomes (adapted from CEFR (2020)):
This 15-hour course develops participants' ability to activate discourse and language-use strategies to mediate specialised vocabulary, terminology and phraseology according to audience and communicative purpose. The course adopts a discourse-centred and action-oriented approach, combining discourse-focused activities (reception, mediation) with action-oriented scenarios (interaction, production), and is based on CEFR 2020 guidelines for language mediation.
By the end of the course, participants will be able to:
- Apply discourse strategies to mediate specialised vocabulary, terminology and phraseology for diverse audiences
- Adapt communication (language, style and register) to suit specific purposes and audiences in academic outreach contexts
- Clarify complex concepts through paraphrasing, reformulation, and the use of synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms
- Facilitate understanding through comparisons, metaphors, analogies and examples
- Transform and adapt specialised texts across genres and registers (e.g., adapting a research paper for a public audience)
Start-End Date
6–27 October 2026
Classes
Total workload: 15 hours (2 sessions per week × 2 hours)
Schedule: Tuesdays and Fridays
Deadline for enrolment
September 29th
Course Teacher
Sandra Isabel Rodrigues
Contacts
Application Form
