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Research on teacher motivation has recently given evidence of being closely related to several variables such as pre-service and in-service teacher training, educational reform, teaching practice, student motivation, work environment, psychological fulfilment and general health conditions. Taking into consideration the most recent studies on EFL teacher motivation across different disciplines and cultures, this paper aims at sharing the author’s personal experience with colleagues who have taught in CLIL trainee courses for High School content teachers. The results of the project, carried out in university run-courses from 2013 to 2017, have shown that teaching certain linguistic aspects (such as WE and ELF features, or word-forming processes) makes teachers linguistically aware of the plurality of English in communication and education, stimulates them strategically, increases their intrinsic motivation and influences their teaching effectiveness.

Over the last decades, proposals to modernise legislative drafting have been choral and among the specific causes generally mentioned there are sentences of undue length, overuse of archaic expressions, repeated definitions and expressions, partiality of nominalisations, lack of gender neutrality. The aim of this analysis is to explore the legislative techniques adopted by drafters of English-speaking countries over the last decades, who are asked to write legal sentences aiming at gender fair and symmetric representation of men and women. The issue examined from a lexico-grammatical perspective culminates in the proposed questions whether certain techniques used to implement gender-neutral drafting can result in a product that is better than the one had before.

In recent years, English has become the lingua franca of medicine and the language teaching profession has seen the emergence of im- plementing English for Medical Purposes (EMP) courses. The needs of EMP learners are very specific and EMP teachers who are language experts and not medical ones need to develop materials that are in line with EMP learners’ specific needs. In response to recognizing EMP students’ needs, extensive corpus-based research has led to specialized medical wordlists (Chen and Ge 2007; Wang, Liang, Ge 2008; Mungra and Canziani 2013; Hsu 2013; Lei and Liu 2016). Such wordlists have given instructors the opportunity to focus on specific vocabulary facil- itating domain specific learning. Among these medical wordlists, the Medical Academic Wordlist for clinical cases (MAWLcc) seems to fur- nish a good base for medical students, since it identifies the specific lexis of patient care. The aim of this paper is to propose an EMP teaching model for lexi- cal verbs extracted from the MAWLcc. These verbs are used in differ- ent communicative contexts for the development of medical students’ academic linguistic competence in their professional context.