Meeting the challenges of European student mobility: Preparing Italian Erasmus students for business studies lectures in English

An increasing number of European students are taking advantage of Erasmus mobility programs to study in a foreigncountry. This has brought to the forefront their special needs as L2 learners, which presents some unique challenges for EAP/ESP researchers and practitioners working in European universities. A case in point is represented by problems encountered by Italian business students who participate in Erasmus exchanges in English-medium universities. More specifically, they often have difficulties understanding content lectures, which can compromise the success of their study abroad experience. This article describes a pre-departure lecture comprehension course that was developed and piloted in response to this problem. The course was based on the findings of extensive corpus-based research to identify the key linguistic, discursive and disciplinary features of lectures from the area of business studies. In addition, the results of the analysis of a post-course questionnaire and insights that emerged from post-sojourn interviews are presented, showing that the participants perceived the course as quite beneficial. The article concludes with suggestions to enhance the effectiveness of the course and a discussion of ways to address the increasingly specific needs of L2 exchange students in European universities.