Learning objectives
At the end of the course the student will have:
- improved his or her ability to understand the content of short articles, reports, legislative acts, and other formal documents commonly encountered in this context.
- improved his or her comprehension of formal university lectures given by native English speakers (British and American);
- increased his or her knowledge of some of the terms commonly used in this context
- improved his or her knowledge of vocabulary, word formation, and structures commonly encountered at B2 (CEFR) level
Teaching methods
The English course will be presented and delivered on the E-learning platform, Elly. The course presents relevant and interesting topics with the help of video lessons presented mostly by university professors from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois in the United States. The Elly platform has allowed us to create a guided, interactive and traceable pathway, composed of inputs (video, audio, written material), and exercises, in the form of ‘quizzes’, with learning assessment tests, and a final certificate that the student can print out. The path is linear and the student is able to continue his progress only on obtaining a good score in the activities proposed (quizzes and tests). The course proposes a different theme for each of the five units. Each unit may take from one hour to three hours. The themes are:
1 Basic Concepts in Livestock Farming;
2 Livestock Health Management;
3 Antimicrobial Resistance and Food Safety;
4 Livestock Stress Management;
5 EU Regulation in ‘EU Animal Health Law’.
Assessment methods and criteria
Assessment is in two stages:
The assessment tests appear automatically at the end of the unit, after successful completion of the quizzes; the number of questions varies; the tests are evaluated on a 0-30 scale, with the pass mark set at 21/30. The assessment tests have a time limit and no correction is given. The tests can be repeated up to three times. The test exercises are varied and include multiple choice comprehension questions on video and written material, completion of short texts with 'technical' or other academic terms, cloze tests, listening exercises, term matching, collocations, ordering – sentences, and / or questions, etc.
The Final Test assesses overall learning of the material presented in the units, and constitutes the final assessment. It is evaluated on a 0 - 30 scale, with the pass mark set at 18. The Final Test is timed, and no correction is given. The Final Test can be repeated up to three times.
The result "IDONEO" for the Final Test allows you to directly access the Attendance Certificate; on it is indicated the final score expressed in thirtieths, which will have validity as an English student (level B2). It is suggested that the student send the certificate to the Professaor at the same time as registering for the scheduled exam session. The latter, in fact, is a fundamental pre-requisite for accessing the final phase of the face-to-face verification.
A brief verification will follow, in the presence of the teacher in the classroom, which will allow the final certification of the B2 level. Due to the pandemic trend and for a matter of protecting the well-being of the student, the examination method may include online execution on the Teams platform in compliance with the guidelines provided by the University.
In particular, a lot of attention will be paid to verifying the identity of the candidate.
This will be carried out by comparing the identification document previously sent by the student to the commission / teacher with the framed face.
The documents will be collected by the teachers before the session, by creating a specific folder on OneDrive or by sending them, via e-mail, to the Commission in the days prior to the exam date.
With regard to female students and students with specific learning disabilities (with reference to the ministerial decree 12th July 2011) dispensatory measures and compensatory tools will be applied, ie oral tests, use of PCs with spell check and speech synthesis, but above all, will be granted an extra time up to a maximum of 30% more or a quantitative reduction will be provided. In any case, the evaluation logic followed, in these circumstances, will evaluate the contents rather than the form.
