Preparation for bilingual medical education

Dear Sir

Globalization is an inevitable trend for medical education in the twenty-first century, making it necessary to cultivate globalized health professionals. In non-English speaking countries, the bilingual medical course (BMC), in which both the students’ mother tongue and a second language (mainly English) are used, is an essential way to cultivate such professionals. In China, the government has attached great importance to BMC and set about formulating a series of policies since 2001. Nowadays, BMC for the undergraduates is in full swing in not only China, but also other Asian countries (Yang & Xi 2009).

However, the outcome of this course does not always live up to the expectation. One major reason is that the students are not well prepared to absorb new medical knowledge via English for medical purposes. Medical English, belonging to the category of English for specific purposes (ESP), has characteristic lexical and syntactic features as well as rhetorical organization, which distinguish it from general English. Lack of training in medical English hampers the effort at setting up BMC.

Therefore, it is necessary to deliver a medical English course to the undergraduates before they receive BMC. To develop such a course, which possesses the characteristics of any ESP courses, the teachers should identify the students’ specific needs as a first step. They can rely on questionnaire surveys, field observations, interviews, etc., to investigate the deficiencies between students’ current performance and the desired performance in the target language situation, namely the BMC. In conducting this course, a genre-informed pedagogy can be adopted by analyzing the written and spoken genres encountered in BMC. Meanwhile, teachers should creatively employ the learning-centered methodology which emphasizes the priority of students in the classes. Last but not the least, continuous assessment should accompany the duration of the course to constantly adjust the course to suit the students’ need.

Our university (Third Military Medical University, TMMU) has taken the lead in designing and providing the medical English course to the undergraduates majoring in clinical medicine, aiming to introduce the general features about medical English texts frequently occurring in BMC (such as the lexical and syntactic features) by engaging students in the target situation-oriented activities, such as reading, writing, discussion, etc. Given its relative infancy, however, many problems remain to be addressed.

Tough as the task is, the effort is urgently needed to design a medical English course to prepare for BMC, and eventually cultivate qualified globalized health professionals.