Evaluation of English for Medical Programs (EMP) in Iran Using Corpus Linguistics along with establishing a complementary compact medical word list

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Foreign Language Dept., Tourism Faculty, Higher Education Complex of Bam, Bam. Iran

2 Foreign Language Department- Faculty of Educational Studies-Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)

3 Department of Foreign Languages - Faculty of Tourism-Higher Education Complex of Bam

Abstract

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has been more considered in these years. English for Medical Purposes (EMP) as one of its types plays a vital role for medical students. This study was conducted to evaluate the textbooks taught in teaching English in different programs of medical universities. The study focused on six textbooks widely used in medical universities. The method for the analysis was corpus linguistics. The researchers of the study compiled the English for Medical Programs (EMP) corpus as well as a corpus from the videos of YouTube with medical content. They compared the corpus of the textbook with the YouTube corpus as well as an already available corpus known as the Medical Web Corpus. Sketch Engine was used for the analysis. According to the findings, the YouTube corpus was somewhat consistent with the Medical Web Corpus and there was an overlap of 69.67%. Also, a 58.53% consistency was obtained between the two corpora of YouTube and EMP. According to further analysis, a Compact Medical Word List (CMWL) was selected according to its coverage in the Youtube and Web corpora. The CMWL which was of zero coverage in EMP corpus is useful to medical learners and professionals as a compact medicine-specific list as well as researchers who may use the new low-frequency lists in corpus studies.

Keywords


 
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