Webinar summary | Implementation of Corpus Linguistics into Medical English Teaching

In her webinar Applying Findings from Corpus Linguistics to Medical English Education, Dr. Shelley Staples, a corpus linguist and healthcare communication researcher at the University of Arizona, USA discussed the data of her research and application of the results into Medical English teaching. In addition, she briefly commented on a list of resources she used in her research, including her papers. Both, the webinar PowerPoint presentation and the list are available for download in the video section.

In a corpus-based analysis, she studied spoken corpora in patient-provider interactions from sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic perspectives. Afterwards, in cooperation with nurse educators, Shelley gave a pronunciation course to practicing international educated nurses (IEN) and gathered data at a hospital from both nurses educated in the US (USN) and overseas. Finaly, she integrated the findings into the second iteration of the pronunciation course.

The outcomes include the following pedagogical implications:

• Corpus findings can be helpful for identifying areas of focus and can be used for developing materials.
• Spoken healthcare corpora are less easy to access, but corpora based on articles are a good resource of authentic texts.
• Written healthcare corpora based on research articles are more accessible and students can create their own corpora that are suitable for their medical specialisation.

Watch the webinar to learn more about the main areas of interest and get tips on classroom activities:

• Patient-centred communication (e. g. tag questions, likelihood adverbials, showing active listening).
• Mitigating asymmetry in the patient-provider relationship (e. g. prediction modals to provide indications, conditionals).
• Developing empathy and rapport (e. g. colloquial expressions, pitch range on empathetic statements).
• Examples of integrating the pronunciation variables, such as pitch range, tone, number of words, into the course for nurses and ideas on material development.
• Suggestions for using corpora for reading and writing medical academic texts; the use of medical word lists.