Designing an ESP course in an academic setting is a multidimensional challenge. To meet it, we should address the needs and interests of our students, which in most cases means incorporating subject-specific content (specialized vocabulary, typical genres, authentic materials, discourse communities practices) into a language course. This on the practitioners’ part involves tackling their lack of disciplinary expertise, which might be very difficult for various factors. One of them might be difficulty in gaining expertise due to a wider curriculum and institutional policies (like teaching many ESPs at the same time). Another might be finding the right balance between discipline-based knowledge and pure language on such a course. It seems that the adequate language teaching expertise which the practitioners should possess in order to help students start using the language as a communication tool for their academic and occupational purposes, can be achieved through a  careful choice of the syllabus type to be adopted, the academic skills and genres to be practised, the specialized topics for the language to be presented and reliable sources of materials to raise motivation and serve as an example. This paper describes taking the aforementioned elements into account when designing specialized English language courses for BSc and MSc students of Biology, Geography and Physics, at the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. It analyses which language course elements can be shared across the mentioned sub-disciplines of EST, and where their syllabi start to diverge.  

Organizing and preparing a language course on the threshold level for medical doctors demands a variety of strategic and methodological planning and considerations. The article deals with the questions as to what command of the foreign language medical doctors need to possess for which purpose a survey of the linguistic requirements of the target students and the specific individual objectives is presented. This relates to the readjustment of the CEFR descriptors necessary to fit such a course and discusses the form, approach, syllabus that were employed to ensure the learning target. Specific didactic material and tips that have proved to be helpful conclude the text. 

The article aims to discuss the use of authentic medical documentation in Latin medical terminology classes for students of medicine during their 1st year at Masaryk University in Brno. Despite the limited access to medical records, for students still lacking experience in clinical medicine, as well as for terminology teachers not educated in medicine itself, but in philology, the use of medical documentation proves to be a highly motivating component of training, allowing students to observe how technical medical Latin is used in real life situations as well as making classes more practical. 

Virtual Erasmus is a collaborative and cross-border legal case study project which brings together law students from different European universities via an e-learning platform. This long-distance trilateral collaboration gives future lawyers the opportunity to engage in a realworld type professional experience: working in international teams on a common task, learning to grasp and appreciate different legal contexts and cultures, while practicing language, legal, and soft skills. Given the format of the project, students gain the scope to employ and further develop their team-work abilities in an intercultural environment. Furthermore, given that they need to organise the bulk of the work themselves, there are strong features of autonomous learning incorporated into the project. Due to the problem-solving nature of the tasks assigned, project participants strengthen their research skills,  both individually and collaboratively. Finally, and most importantly, being in direct contact with authentic materials relevant to their discipline, student-participants not only encounter field-specific vocabulary, but also practice productive skills, such as when submitting their project in written form. The added professional benefit lies in the opportunity to share perspectives on how similar legal problems are viewed and dealt with  in different jurisdictions across Europe. The present article outlines the 2017–2018 edition of the project, alongside its pedagogical rationale and reflection on the experience from both teachers’ and students’ perspectives.   

DEVELOPING ACADEMIC LITERACY BY WRITING FOR WIKIPEDIA

Many teachers of academic writing want to help students bridge the gap between writing for personal purposes and writing for academic purposes. The latter seems considerably more challenging, and decidedly less familiar. One way of facilitating students’ initiation as academic writers is to ask them to write a Wikipedia article, which requires several academic writing sub-skills, such as summarizing or paraphrasing. Students need to be able to demonstrate critical thinking while choosing a suitable topic, and assessing the reliability of their sources. Then, they must show their familiarity with the genre conventions of Wikipedia. This article focuses on a project done witha group of archaeology students of the Jagiellonian University. The students were asked to choose and research a topic, and later write a short Wikipedia article, based on what they had found out about their respective topics. The article presents the benefi ts and potential difficulties of this project, and I will share my students’ perspectives as well.

This article is focused on two important problems connected with the analysis of documents of Polish medieval hagiography, namely a correct translation from medieval Latin into Polish as well as understanding and interpretation of ethical (that is moral) values of the translated text. In my commentary to the discussion, which is the key teaching and learning technique during a translation course, I deal with the structure and grammar of the medieval text in reference to classical rules and discuss (against the background of the ancient moral tradition) the medieval reinterpretation of these moral values that had appeared in ancient Rome and then became the essence of ethos of Saints in the Middle Ages. Such approach to the analysis and discussion enables me to show pieces of medieval hagiography not only as documents written according to the rules of the medieval religious convention but also as a source of ancient Roman (romanitas) reminiscences (both structural and ethical, mainly moral ones).   

The article presents an interpretation of two Latin epigrams composed by Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, a Polish Baroque poet and Jesuit. His poems include the most important principle invented by Jesuit authors, i.e., applicatio sensuum and constitute an exquisite example of synesthesia. 

The article presents the fi gures of three historians and theoreticians of Renaissance music: Jerzy Libanus of Legnica, Sebastian of Felsztyn and Marcin Kromer. Basic scribal abbreviations or sigla from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are explained on the example of their works. The above remarks will make it easier for students of musicology to read old prints. These remarks are supplemented by a list of basic works devoted to reading a complicated Latin text. Keywords: theory and history of music / musical compendium 16th cent., Latin scribal abbreviations or sigla, musical notation, musical paleography.