Medical Discourse and ESP Courses for Romanian Nursing Undergraduates

Popa, Diana Elena

doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.06.004

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…In this instance, Mat reframed English language teaching as one that paid less attention about language accuracy but about the language needs of the engineering students. This finding aligns with other studies of English in various disciplinary contexts which have reported the ESP teaching that addressed the language needs of a discipline (see Kuteeva & Airey, 2013;Popa, 2013). Thus, his instructional practices were aimed at students producing the language to fulfil tasks for this course rather than concentrating on teaching the language.…”

Section: Reframing the English Language Coursessupporting

confidence: 86%

“…In medicine, for example, Popa (2013) argues that the medical field has its own set of language discourses which need to be communicated accurately to save lives. In engineering, there are technical words and terminologies which are specialised for engineering that engineering students need to learn to help them read and understand engineering materials, and convey engineering information effectively (Mudraya, 2006).…”

Section: Discipline-specific English Language Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Managing the complexities of English language teaching in engineering

Mohamed¹

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In this 21 st century, engineering employers seek professional engineers who have excellent scientific knowledge and are able to demonstrate good communication and problem solving skills.With this focus on job demands, engineering education has been restructured, balancing the emphasis between scientific knowledge and soft skills. This shift in focus has not only affected the teaching and learning in engineering education, but also English Language (EL) educators who are involved in teaching non-technical components within an engineering education curriculum.This shift in focus has raised the demand for ESP which include teaching communication skills in English language discourse used in engineering, and teaching problem solving skills in English language teaching. With this demand, challenges are inevitable among EL educators who are generally prepared for teaching English for generic purposes in school settings and who bring with them pedagogical knowledge and beliefs in English language teaching, as well as identities they have developed from their previous to their new workplace. This shift also raises questions about the ways in which English language teaching is positioned, the role of English language courses within an engineering-specific context and the implications of this positioning on the design of the English language courses.The main aim of this study was to investigate how EL educators managed the complexities in teaching English at one technical university in Malaysia. In addressing the research questions, a case study design was developed to highlight the complexities within that context and the ways in which EL educators managed these complexities. The data for this study were collected through qualitative and quantitative methods to unpack the complex process of teaching English for engineering which included teaching problem solving and communication skills. These methods obtained insights into the ways in which EL educators conceptualised English language teaching, positioned themselves and framed their teaching in an engineering context. The quantitative data were collected through a questionnaire involving 12 EL educators. The data from the questionnaire were used to profile the EL educators at the English Language Department of this university. Based on the profiling, four EL educators teaching undergraduate engineering students were selected for the main study. The qualitative data were collected through document study, individual semistructured interviews, classroom observations, video recording of classroom observations and stimulated recall protocols.This study found that there were disconnections between English language teaching and the engineering discipline at this university. These disconnections were due to the dissemination process of the engineering accreditation requirements whereby these requirements went through ii multiple layers of interpretation, adaptation and translation before they reached the EL educators, causing ambiguities in positioning English language ...

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Section: Reframing the English Language Coursessupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Discipline-specific English Language Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing the complexities of English language teaching in engineering

Mohamed¹

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“…words lists of frequent and salient vocabulary in health and medical sciences textbooks), and the content area (medical) lists in particular developed in Chapters 4 and 5 can be useful for a wider audience of ESP and EMP teachers and learners. For example, ESP teachers of medical and health sciences in various parts of the worldsuch as Iran (Ghalandari & Talebinejad, 2012), Romania (Popa, 2013), Saudi Arabia (Javid, 2011), and Pakistan (Niazi, 2014), among many otherscan benefit from using the medical lists created in the present investigation. These medical word lists can be used to determine the vocabulary worth focusing on when teaching the vocabulary learning strategies English for Medical Purposes students need to independently continue with the acquisition of the discipline-specific lexis.…”

Section: An Esp Coursementioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating the Vocabulary Size of L1 Spanish ESP Learners and the Vocabulary Load of Medical Textbooks

Quero¹

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The main goal of this research on the vocabulary load of medical textbooks is to use a corpus-based approach to investigate the number of words learners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) need to meet the lexical demands of medical textbooks written in English, and achieve a good reading comprehension of such texts. This thesis explores the relationship between vocabulary size of prospective learners of ESP in two Spanish medium universities in Venezuela, and the vocabulary load of medical textbooks. The two main variables considered to calculate the vocabulary load of medical textbooks were the vocabulary sizes of ESP undergraduate students, and the lexical text coverage of medical textbooks. In order to determine the vocabulary size of ESP learners, a monolingual version of Nation and Beglar’s (2007) Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and a Spanish bilingual version of the same test, which was translated for the purpose of the present study, were administered to a group of 408 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who are speakers of Spanish as a first language (L1). For determining the lexical text coverage of medical textbooks, a written medical (med1) corpus of 5.4 million tokens, and a general comparison corpus of the same size were used. The lexical text coverage was estimated in two ways, with the help of existing word lists such as the General Service list (GSL; West, 1953), the Academic Word list (AWL; Coxhead, 2000), the Pilot Science List (PSL; Coxhead and Hirsh, 2007), and with the help of the British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA; Nation, 2012) word family lists. Additionally, medical words across the high, mid and low-frequency bands were identified using a two-level semantic rating scale designed for this purpose, and a set of over thirty 1,000 medical word lists developed. The new medical word lists created using the med1 corpus were then validated on a different medical corpus (i.e., the med2 corpus) of a similar size (5.8 million tokens). The major finding of this thesis was that in order to reach the 98% lexical threshold required to achieve optimal reading comprehension of medical textbooks written in English, besides the top 3,000 most frequent word families of the English language, ESP learners doing medical studies would need to know at least 26,000 words related to the medical field. Moreover, this research found that when adding medical words from the existing word lists (e.g., GSL, AWL, Pilot Science List, and BNC/COCA lists) to the new medical word lists created here, the overall coverage of medical words gets close to 37% of the running words in the medical text. In relation to the vocabulary size of the EFL learners tested, this research determined: (1) the average vocabulary size of the Spanish as a first language (L1) ESP students taking the VST which was around 6,000 word families, and (2) the point at which it becomes more efficient for the medical students to focus on medical words rather than general words (e.g., knowledge of the 5,000 most frequent families). The results of this research placed particular emphasis on the medical words that ESP students meet in medical textbooks, but may not learn through existing general and academic word lists.

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Developing an ESP workshop to promote handover practices in nursing communication: A case study of nurses in a bilingual hospital in Hong Kong

Pun

2023

English for Specific Purposes

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Medical Discourse and ESP Courses for Romanian Nursing Undergraduates

Cited by 6 publications

References 10 publications

Managing the complexities of English language teaching in engineering

Managing the complexities of English language teaching in engineering

Estimating the Vocabulary Size of L1 Spanish ESP Learners and the Vocabulary Load of Medical Textbooks

Developing an ESP workshop to promote handover practices in nursing communication: A case study of nurses in a bilingual hospital in Hong Kong

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