A course design for "Readings in English medical papers" for ESP

Abstract

This article reports how the author designed a new course titled "Readings in English medical papers from Applied Linguistics perspectives." In spite of young medical students'strong need to master skills for reading professional papers, it was not easy to offer such a course in Japan, partly because the liberal arts education traditionally puts more emphasis on a foreign language as a source for stimulating students'knowledge of liberal arts, rather than teaching "skills," and partly because language teachers are usualy from non-medical fields and they find stepping into a medical or dental field to be intimidating. The author selected specific papers on communication between doctor and patient and tried to introduce students to the conventional way of structuring a data-based scientific paper, which could be either quantitative or qualitative. After reviewing the literature in this field, and ESP as a base theory in this paper, the classroom activities and outcomes from the students are reported, and the areas a linguistic specialist, or non-medical language teacher could cover is suggested. Implications and suggestions for future study are also presented.