An e-based environment for teaching and learning English for the Social Services.

The present paper presents the reader with a project which is being developed at the University of Torino for enabling students of the degree course in “Social Services” to learn English with special reference to their profession. The project consists of the development of an e-based teaching and learning environment. The project is motivated by the lack of English language teaching and learning materials related to the profession of the social worker, at least, on the Italian market, where attention is more drawn to English for other purposes (e.g.: business, law, and medicine). The aim is to provide language learners with resources which can be used beside those which are currently available. These consist of two manuals which have been prepared specifically: one is addressed to beginners and learners with basic notions of English grammar and lexis, whereas the other manual is used with students whose level of English is pre-intermediate. For the realisation of the present project, corpus linguistics methodology has been applied. A corpus of about three million words has been built. The texts included in the corpus deal with topics connected to the profession of social worker. Some have been selected for reading comprehension activities and provide the learners with links to the concordances of some highlighted terms which are considered as relevant to the language of the profession. The availability of a key term list has been useful for the building of a glossary of reference.