Joanne Spataro is a Canadian English Foreign Language mother-tongue professor and teacher trainer at the University of Pisa, Italy. She started teaching Academic Writing Courses at Maryland University, USA. She is currently teaching Scientific English Courses for the resident doctors of the Medical Schools and also for the Nursing Students of Polo di Livorno. Within the Medicine Department of Pisa University, her research is focused on implementing a patient-oriented communication both in the medical and nursing field by means of teaching English for Medical Purposes. This has brought her to work in several medical departments of Pisa University, such as the 1st Orthopaedic Ward Division integrating this type of research with the Canadian CanMeds Physician Competency Framework with particular reference to the Role of Physicians and Healthcare Professsionals as Communicators.
Her research is also currently based on Writing and Presenting Scientific Papers teaching methodolgy from a cross.cultural perspective, This investigation has brought her to hold several Academic Scientific Paper Writing and Scientific Paper Presentation Courses for university professors, researchers and Ph.D students of the University of Pisa.
Joanne has also taught both in Pre-service and In-service Teacher Education university programs and has also worked in collaboration with Manchester University as a teacher trainer. She has been Professor in Didactics of English Language at the Faculty of Education, University of Florence and a teacher trainer at SSIS “Scuola di Specializzazioni all'insegnamento nelle Scuole Secondarie” for ten years. She is currently involved in The CLIL Methodology Teaching Project in collaboration with Cafre and USR.
Her book The Wind beneath the Wings: a reflective/participant approach to EFL teacher training, ETS, Pisa, 2005 represents the passion that she puts in teacher education. She has also published other articles, such as“ L’uso del Portfolio nella Formazione Iniziale degli Insegnanti”, “ Canada and Italy: a common pathway in teacher education,“Educative Assessment: evaluating the SSIS teacher trainees’ final papers within a common framework”. She has several forthcoming publications, such as: “Integrating patient-oriented communication skills in the English for Medical Purpose Curriculum: a Canadian/Italian Case Study in the Orthopaedic Ward Division, Medicine Faculty of Pisa University” (Forthcoming in Patient Education and Counseling, An International Journal for Communication in Health) and “From an Italian content-oriented writing style to an English reader-oriented one: a cross-cultural approach to teaching EAP writing”, (forthcoming in US-China Education Review.
