ESP Based Genre Analysis of Lexico-Syntactic Structures of Medicine and Surgery Texts

Abstract

The ESP genre-based analysis dwells on the discourse patterns and language use in specific disciplines. It is perceptively rewarding in teaching and learning specific English. Therefore, the study examined the lexis and structure of medicine and surgery texts to establish the language use in the field. It also investigated the forms and structure needed for the pedagogy of teaching and learning specific English. The data was collected through the corpora randomly selected from seven branches of medicine and surgery. The researchers employed the content analysis theory to give both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the texts. It was discovered that the texts were replete with technical words. Some of the words revealed that the texts contained Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes while some were eponyms and synonyms. The study also observed a variety of sentence types in the forms of simple, compound, complex and compound-complex structures however there was preference for compound-complex and simple sentences than other types in the texts. The compound complex sentences were prevalent in the texts. These peculiarities showed the language use in the field of medicine and surgery. For pedagogical implications, language instructions should focus on word formation processes, lexical relations and salient syntactic structures. Therefore, the researchers concluded that the ESP based genre analysis had pedagogical potentials and they recommended teaching and learning of discipline specific English language programs for the learners in the field.