Competenze comunicative in contesti professionali. Il caso della literacy medica

In this contribution we tackle the concept of literacy from a novel perspective, i.e. from the point of view of the communicative skills that are necessary to effectively interact in professional contexts, where the social and knowledge imbalance is usually more significant than in everyday conversations. We focus in particular on the medical context and, by analyzing relevant interactional phenomena, we show that literacy, intended as communicative competence, can be weak also for those considered high-skilled individuals (in our case, clinicians). The paper provides an initial interpretative framework to account for pragmatic aspects of clinical interactions that characterize the communicative competence of high-skilled individuals. Our observations can be considered as premises for more detailed research on interventions aimed at improving what we might call ‘medical literacy’.