A Communicative Approach to Medical Terminology Building
200M048 M. Y.
This thesis is a study of a course design for medical terminology building. A prototype of the course design for medical terminology building will be proposed in this paper. The target is medical vocabulary acquisition with the methods of etymology-based language teaching and supporting communicative tasks. These methods are theoretically based on communicative approach or communicative language teaching (CLT). The ultimate goal of this course is that with the help of knowledge of medical terminology, learners will be able to read specialized literature, write research papers and acquire communicative competence in their specialized fields in the future. This course should act as a bridge between learners' present English ability and their future necessary competence of medical English.
This thesis is organized as follows:
Chapter1,Theoretical Background of ESP, briefly describes theoretical background of a course design for ESP and the present situation of English courses in Japanese educational institutions. I will explain six procedures of analysis for ESP course designing. The procedures are divided into the following three categories: Needs analysis, Genre analysis and Learning method (analysis).
Chapter 2, Needs Analysis, shows results of three needs analyses. The first is based on a research of graduates of a medical school of which resource is The Realities of the Use of Medical English: A Survey of the H.U.S.M. Graduates in 1981, 1984 and 1991(Hishida & Ohki, 2000). The second is based on a research about the needs analysis of English for Clinical Nurses (Watanabe, 1998). The third is based on some observations of the writer and some researchers.
Chapter 3, Genre Analysis, provides results of a genre analysis. I will argue how much terminology should be contained and how it should be sorted out in the course design for basic terminology building. It is based on the results of an analysis of three textbooks using corpus functions of lexical analysis, because content and sequencing of vocabulary teaching should be decided by frequency and range of occurrences (Nation, 2001).
Chapter 4, Learning Method, discusses theoretical backgrounds of CLT whose main characteristics are notional and functional syllabuses. I will show how effectively the approach will be applied to the medical terminology building course that I propose.
Chapter 5, A Course Unit, describes a detailed prototype of a course design to build learner's basic medical terminology using the etymology-based language teaching and supporting communicative tasks.