Three Suggestions to Improve Medical English Teaching

Abstract：As a kind of ESP, medical English teaching has an important impact on both English teachers and medical students. A good medical English teaching can help the medical students to improve themselves smoothly and easily in the medical area. In this article, three suggestions were provided for the medical English teachers to improve their English teaching in medical field.

Key words：medical English teaching; English teachers; medical students

中图分类号： H315.9 文献标识码： A 文章编号：1672-1578（2012)05-0004-02

Since the implementing of reform and opening up policy, China has witnessed great achievements in politics, economy, science, technology and culture. Those achievements tell us that needs for talents are no longer single but plural which means that people who are majored in and only know English are no longer needed, instead those who are not only well command of English but also familiar with another special field are in a growing demand. Definitely, it is easier to adapt to and contribute to the society for people who are good at English and also specialized in other aspects. That’s why ESP comes into being.

ESP is the abbreviation for English for Special Purpose. Different from GE (General English) ESP covers three large categories. They are EST (English for Science and Technology), EBE (English for Business and Economics) and ESS (English for the Social Sciences). In this article a small branch of EST will be focused on, that is EMS (English for Medical Studies).

As a kind of ESP, medical English plays an increasingly important role in this fast-developing medicine field. Only by using it correctly and efficiently can we obtain and introduce the advanced medical information from other countries. Especially nowadays medicine knowledge is updating in an unprecedented fast speed, in order to achieve a successful communication with the foreign academic specialists and catch up with the development of the world, medical workers and students have to leaf through a large quantity of original articles, books and documents, Therefore great attention should be paid to medical English teaching.

In order to make the medical English teaching more effective and successful, three suggestions are provided for English teachers to improve their teachings in this specialist field.

To begin with, attending a training course is necessary for all medical English teachers. Most of the medical English teachers are used to be GE teachers, although they have teaching experience, to some extent they lack professional knowledge and their previous teaching methods are no longer suitable for this specialized subject--medical English. Therefore a training course should be prepared for those future medical English teachers. Two parts should be concluded in this training course. One is language improvement and the other is professional development. Language training aims to improve the language competence, such as the capability to express, the reading and listening comprehension, etc. while the latter emphasize on the structure of the professional language pattern, the special teaching methods, the genre of the professional language and an most important content in this training course is practice. In my opinion, a period of practicing time in the hospital is very necessary for the future medical English teachers. Although they need not to be a medical professor, it is crucial for them to learn some basic information about the patients, the disease and the hospital. Otherwise all the English terms concerning about medicine seems to be too abstract and difficult to understand. Only when teachers have a better knowledge of the medicine field and keep pace with the students can a successful teaching be achieved.