"Negotiating Meaning in the FL: The Children Act from Fiction to Fact"

The paper deals with the complex issue of acquiring an adequate foreign language competence in specific professional domains. Ever increasingly, once their studies are over, foreign language graduates exploit their degrees in professional fields Those whose task it is to move language students towards the required competences and discursive practices required to be competitive on the job market, are faced with a particularly arduous task, mainly because the foreign language students generally perceive specialized linguistic and cultural domains as uncharted territory above and beyond the reach of their previously acquired skills. We wish here to illustrate some of the techniques we employed when exploiting literary texts within text-based learning paths, and their successful outcome in terms of special language acquisition and functional competence.