ZANOLA Annalisa

Adopting English as a common language in business communication is becoming a rule, which implies that global English needs new ways of studying the language, and renewed theoretical and methodological approaches to the classification of spoken and written varieties. This research project proposes a sociolinguistic approach to the study of global English in public speaking, in an extremely movable and non-localized context, that is, the international business context. Great mobility and the absence of fixed locality are among the most striking characteristics of the varieties of English used in international business communication. The approach to the interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity of public speaking in business communication presented was characterized by a specific focus on the role of intercultural interaction and exchange, and an insight into the implications of using English across borders and sectors was also provided.

Informed consent (IC) is a fundamental ethical and practical part of patient care, and a critical component of clinical research. The IOM (Institute of Medicine), in its 2004 Health Literacy Report, defined it as the ‘capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information’. What is peculiar about IC is the supposed informational component preceding the consensus event. The solicitation of IC to research is therefore a significant and particular form of legal-lay communication. The lay subject’s communication is with a representative of the scientific world, typically a research coordinator or a practitioner, but the requirements of IC are prescribed by law. As a result, a linguistic and cross-cultural approach to the study of the ‘informed consent’ is especially complex, as it takes places at the intersection of three disparate worlds: the lay (the research subjects, or the patients), the scientific (the researchers, or the practitioners), and the legal (the regulatory framework). From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) to the Oviedo Convention (1997-99) up to the ‘Carta di Firenze’ Document (2005), this research is aimed at defining the real value and meaning of ‘informed consent’, in terms of patients’ understanding, satisfaction, and anxiety or other psychological distress. As the state-of-the-art definition stands at present, IC is an ethical concept based on the principle that patients and research subjects should understand and agree to the potential consequences of the clinical care they receive, but more work still needs to be done in the area of ‘understanding’ health and illness.

Over the last decades, scholars have been applying linguistics in efforts to understand the myriad profound and complex interrelationships between language and health issues and contexts. As these undertakings have become more expansive, collaboration across disciplines has become increasingly common. The intricacies of the mutual effects between language and human health - how language use affects health as well as how health affects language - have encouraged linguists to reach across disciplinary boundaries in their examinations of public and private dimensions of health communication. Our research projects will describe a significant international spectrum in terms of research engagement ON, FOR and WITH the health communication subject matter.