Title: Roll Up Your Sleeve: Re-Designing an Intermediate Italian Course as Italian for Healthcare Professionals
Presenter: Sarah Annunziato, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese

Description: 
Risner et. al observed that success in the modern workforce is increasingly dependent on both intercultural and global communication skills. Therefore, language for specific purposes courses are gaining in visibility and importance. In a 2017 survey conducted by Sánchez-López et. al, healthcare ranked as the sixth most popular topic for research in this field of pedagogy. That conclusion aligns well with ACTFL’s 21st Century Skills Map (2020), which also lists Health Literacy as one of the four major categories of interdisciplinary themes that world languages courses should emphasize. While courses for healthcare practitioners have long been a staple of World Languages Programs such as Spanish, they are less abundant in the field of Italian Studies. This presentation will explore the benefits and challenges of designing such a course for a less commonly taught language using the example of Intermediate Italian II for Professionals (ITAL 2030) as a template.