Towards a multilingual discursive competence for the endodontics specialist.

The ability to understand and produce scientific texts, such as abstracts, reviews, e-mails and discussion forums in the WEB in a foreign language becomes an essential tool for the international scientific community. We recognize the professionals’ ability to master their own vocabulary discipline in other languages. However, difficulties arise when they need to communicate with their peers of other languages. This is because specialists - in this case in Endodontics which is the field of scientific application that we chose in this research - usually lack the multilingual knowledge they need to be able to understand texts in two or more foreign languages and to express themselves in writing in at least one foreign language. In order to answer the questions settled in this research, the first stage of the project was started. It consisted in the preparation of a reading comprehension test of a specialized scientific text in the mother tongue. Next, the corresponding assessment instrument was made. From the observation of the results we concluded that a lack of formal mastery of the reading comprehension and writing skills in the mother tongue could have a similar impact on the field of foreign languages.

Recibido: Diciembre-2002 Aceptado: Febrero-2003