Teaching Professional Communication Through Podcasts, TV Series and Literature: Strategies and Perspectives

Learning foreign languages and professional communication at intermediate to advanced levels present some peculiar aspects and difficulties. They are mostly related to the fact that there is an initial stumbling block due to a certain prejudice on the part of the learners themselves, who perceive the professional communication language as something foreign, ‘other’ and extremely complex compared to the language they have learned up to that point. This leads them, as naturally as unconsciously, to raise an additional emotional filter that further complicates the learning process and the acquisition of new terms and phrases. For this reason, students often learn by heart, and with no connection (or with a very limited connection) with the real context of use and application the vocabulary and expressions related to professional communication field. This purely mnemonic approach in learning a foreign language has long been shown to be inadequate, and although it is generally considered outdated, it tends to persist when dealing with specialised languages. In order to overcome this, teachers today have three instruments at their disposal that seem particularly relevant to us: literary texts, TV series and podcasts. The aim of this article is to investigate how to deal with them so to reach the best educational outcome.