Lexical verbs for medical professionals

Abstract

In recent years, English has become the lingua franca of medicine and the language teaching profession has seen the emergence of im- plementing English for Medical Purposes (EMP) courses. The needs of EMP learners are very specific and EMP teachers who are language experts and not medical ones need to develop materials that are in line with EMP learners’ specific needs. In response to recognizing EMP students’ needs, extensive corpus-based research has led to specialized medical wordlists (Chen and Ge 2007; Wang, Liang, Ge 2008; Mungra and Canziani 2013; Hsu 2013; Lei and Liu 2016). Such wordlists have given instructors the opportunity to focus on specific vocabulary facil- itating domain specific learning. Among these medical wordlists, the Medical Academic Wordlist for clinical cases (MAWLcc) seems to fur- nish a good base for medical students, since it identifies the specific lexis of patient care. The aim of this paper is to propose an EMP teaching model for lexi- cal verbs extracted from the MAWLcc. These verbs are used in differ- ent communicative contexts for the development of medical students’ academic linguistic competence in their professional context.