Bridging the Vocabulary Gap for EFL Medical Undergraduates: The Establishment of a Medical Word List

Autor/in	Hsu, Wenhua
Titel	Bridging the Vocabulary Gap for EFL Medical Undergraduates: The Establishment of a Medical Word List
Quelle	In: Language Teaching Research, 17 (2013) 4, S.454-484 (31 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1362-1688
DOI	10.1177/1362168813494121
Schlagwörter	English (Second Language); Second Language Instruction; Second Language Learning; Medical Education; Word Lists; Vocabulary Development; English for Special Purposes; Undergraduate Students; Computational Linguistics; Instructional Materials; Teaching Methods; Word Frequency; Selection Criteria; Databases; Foreign Countries; Greek; Latin; Medical Students; Textbook Evaluation; Taiwan + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? English as second language; English; Second Language; Englisch als Zweitsprache; Fremdsprachenunterricht; Zweitsprachenerwerb; Medizinische Ausbildung; Wortliste; Wortschatzarbeit; Linguistics; Computerlinguistik; Lehrmaterial; Lehrmittel; Unterrichtsmedien; Teaching method; Lehrmethode; Unterrichtsmethode; Word analysis; Frequency; Wortanalyse; Häufigkeit; Selection criterion; Auslesekriterium; Datenbank; Ausland; Grieche; Griechisch; Latein
Abstract	This study created a medical word list (MWL) to bridge the gap between non-technical and technical vocabulary. The researcher compiled a corpus containing 155 textbooks across 31 medical subject areas from e-book databases (totaling 15 million running words) and examined the range and frequency of words outside the most frequent 3,000-word families along the British National Corpus scale. To reach 98% lexical coverage for adequate comprehension of medical texts, 595 of the most frequently-occurring word families in the corpus were ultimately chosen and formed the MWL, and these accounted for 10.72% of the tokens in the medical textbooks under study. Excluding highly-specialized medical terms of Greek/Latin sources, the MWL encompasses various sub-technical and lay-technical vocabularies. It is suggested that with the help of free online concordancers, medical teachers can raise their students' awareness of the commonly-used medical words reported in this study by incorporating concordance data into teaching materials, thereby consolidating the vocabulary knowledge acquired from the MWL. For medical novices, the present MWL provides a window to the medical register. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10