Jesús Montero Melchor

Unversidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

Nursing Science texts in English: the need of non-native readers for some grammar literacy and modelling

As Halliday puts it (1993), the most obvious practical reason for analysing scientific texts is educational. Making scientific English texts accessible to non-native students is a demanding task that needs tackle problems of a typological, registerial and lexico- grammatical nature. However, the pressure of teaching time shortness makes practitioners look for concise aspects that facilitates the task. This paper reports on some of the difficulties faced by a group of Spanish Nursing students reading and informally translating some Nursing Science texts in English. It is thereafter suggested that apart from technicality, complex NGs and grammatical metaphor, a focus should also be placed on post-deictics, some hypotactic expanding and projecting VGs, on the one hand, and on degree modelling awareness of modals and quantifiers, on the other. This focus is grounded on typological differences between English and Spanish as suggested by the translation difficulties posed by students. The texts used in class with the students will be used for examples.