Development of web-based educational material “Easy-to-understand Medical Terms for Foreigners”

Abstract

We have developed a teaching material entitled "Easy-to-understand Medical Terms for Foreigners" to support non-native speakers of Japanese who wish to receive medical education in Japan and eventually pass the Japanese National Medical Examination. The format of the material was made to be a user-friendly web material for learners. In creating it, we decided to build a "corpus of medical books" to extract medical vocabulary. 5 medical books were selected and a corpus of over 800,000 words was created. The content of the material is largely divided into medical glossaries including dictionaries, and exercises. In addition to English translations, the medical terminology search includes Japanese audio information to help non-native speakers who do not know how to read or break words. In addition, onomatopoeia, specialized words and everyday words, family names, medical book verb inflection, synonyms, and expressions for medical interviews are included to meet the needs of learners, while at the same time providing content that may be difficult for non-native speakers to master. The cooperation of medical publishers in the creation of this material was highly appreciated.