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Language Learning in Higher Education

Journal of the European Confederation of Language Centres in Higher Education (CercleS)

Editor-in-Chief: Szczuka-Dorna, Liliana / O’Rourke, Breffni

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On the importance of a genre-based approach in the teaching of English for Medical Purposes

Isabel K. León Pérez / Pedro Martín-Martín
Published Online: 2016-05-03 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/cercles-2016-0005

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Abstract

In experimental disciplinary fields such as medicine, the writing up of a research paper in English may represent a major hurdle, especially for inexperienced writers and users of EAL (English as an Additional Language), mainly due to a lack of familiarity with international discourse conventions. Despite the efforts of many EAP (English for Academic Purposes) researchers and practitioners to provide support for medical PhD students and novice scholars by carrying out studies on research writing, specific courses with an explicit pedagogical approach to the teaching of academic genres are still scarce. Moreover, it often happens that the only possibility of receiving training in writing skills is in the pre-clinical years, when the students are not yet experienced language users and when they lack both the genre conventions and the specialized subject knowledge for such a demanding task. In this article, we offer our view of a genre-driven pedagogy and its practical applications in an EMP (English for Medical Purposes) classroom with the ultimate aim of helping students to publish their medical papers in international (English-language) journals. Our genre-based teaching approach consists in a prior discussion with students about the socio-cultural context in which a particular academic genre occurs. This process of discovery of the social circumstances that surround a specific genre can help them understand more readily its communicative purpose. We believe that a second stage should be the explicit teaching of functions and language structures of archetypal academic texts, initially in a highly controlled fashion, and later on a freer basis, but always using reference papers for illustration and comparison. If learners are more aware of the rhetorical strategies preferred by the members of their disciplinary communities, they may feel more confident as EAL writers about the rhetorical options they can choose depending on the context and type of audience they are addressing.

Keywords: genre-based pedagogy; EAL students; medical academic discourse; research article; cross-cultural variation; controlled language

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About the article

Isabel K. León Pérez

Isabel K. León Pérez, PhD, is a lecturer in English for Medical Purposes at the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) in Tenerife, Spain. She has done research in applied linguistics, particularly cross-disciplinary, cross-linguistic academic/professional discourse analysis and English for Specific Purposes, and has published in ASp (journal of the Groupe d’Etude et de Recherche en Anglais de Spécialité, GERAS), IBÉRICA (journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes, AELFE), Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, and English for Specific Purposes. She currently belongs to the ULL research group for contrastive academic discourse analysis (ANCODA) and has also worked in the Multidisciplinary and Multilingual Research Group on Scientific Discourse Analysis, conducted by Françoise Salager-Meyer (Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela).

Pedro Martín-Martín

Pedro Martín-Martín, PhD, is a lecturer in English for academic purposes at the Universidad de La Laguna in Tenerife, Spain. His main area of interest is inter-cultural and cross-disciplinary analysis of academic discourse. He has published a number of articles in English for Specific Purposes and Journal of English for Academic Purposes, among other international journals. He is also the author of the book The rhetoric of the abstract in English and Spanish scientific discourse (2005), and co-editor of the monograph English as an Additional Language in research publication and communication (2008). He is also a team member of a multidisciplinary project (ENEIDA) on the strategies used by Spanish scholars when seeking to publish in English-language journals.

Published Online: 2016-05-03

Published in Print: 2016-05-01

Citation Information: Language Learning in Higher Education, Volume 6, Issue 1, Pages 95–117, ISSN (Online) 2191-6128, ISSN (Print) 2191-611X, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/cercles-2016-0005.

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