Receptive recognition and productive written use of technical and sub-technical vocabulary by first year undergraduate students of medicine in the UK

Abstract

First-year medical students Learning and Teaching Resources (LETERs) include a
considerable amount of discipline-specific vocabulary for English for Medical
Purposes (EMP) such as the technical and the sub-technical. The former refers to the specialised vocabulary used only in a specific field (Chung and Nation, 2004, Coxhead, 2013), while the latter refers to the shared vocabulary amongst
academic disciplines (Baker, 1988; Hsu, 2013). First year medical students’
familiarization with the technical and sub-technical vocabulary typically occurs
from reading LETERs during their coursework and was cited as a contributing
factor towards their study-related stress and burnout (Sinclair, 1997; Boni et al., 2018). The density of Learning and Teaching Resources (LETERs) as part of first year medical students’ coursework in terms of technical and sub-technical vocabulary as well as the receptive and productive vocabulary of L1 and L2 medical students in their first year is an area that has been unexplored by scholars in the field of EMP. Thus, the aim of this study is to look into the technical and sub-technical vocabulary of medicine from multiple perspectives such as its density in medical texts and examine the recognition and production of technical and sub-technical vocabulary from a total sample of 115 (L1 and L2) first year medical students in the UK. In order to collect the language data, two corpora of medical language were compiled as part of this study: the Medical Receptive (MEDREC) corpus of 2,097,627 running words based on 6 types of LETERs and the Medical Productive (MEDPRO) corpus of 209,160 running words of115 written samples. Findings from lexical density analysis on LETERs suggests a propensity towards a higher degree of usage of technical vocabulary and results from the Receptive Recognition (RecRec) Task indicate a significant progress by the end of the initial semester in both technical and sub-technical vocabulary. In addition, analysis of productive vocabulary usage suggests that the sub-technical vocabulary was denser in medical students’ writings, which is inversely proportional in relation to the vocabulary that medical students were introduced to from LETERs texts with L1 or L2 English having a minimal effect on findings. The original contribution of this thesis is to fill a gap in the current literature on the complexity of disciplinary vocabulary used in LETERs and the development of the RecRec Task suitable for new medical/EMP students. In addition, it is one of the first experimental studies in medical English, which involved both L1 and L2 medical students’ receptive and productive vocabulary skills.

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ORCID for Ying Zheng: orcid.org/0000-0003-2574-0358

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