Today, medical practitioners everywhere need to use Medical English (ME) at work or for study. To keep up-to-date with medical science, they need to be competent in ME and take appropriate courses. There has been no such course at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade, and the present paper provides suggestions for how to develop such a course, taking into account common and context-specifi c features. The objective of this article is hence to provide an outline of a ME course for Serbian doctors to increase the doctor's profi ciency in written and spoken communication in the context of current medical practice and patient care. Furthermore, the aim of the article is for the Serbian doctors to be well trained to successfully perform their professional tasks in the English language of medicine.
Following the overall trend at the Faculty of Medicine University of Belgrade, the English language test has been transformed into a multiple-choice format. While the previous testing format checked if students acquired the necessary skills through a variety of exercises, the new format contains only multiple-choice exercises. In this paper we compare and contrast the two formats concerning the complexity of the tasks included and their influence on acquiring various aspects of the language. We concentrate on students' success in the final exam, our expectations and possible further improvements to the test. In accordance with our expectations, the new format proved to be more convenient and it meant better overall results in the final exam. Students score much better in grammar and vocabulary sections of the new format, whereas the reading comprehension section seems to be slightly more demanding than before.
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