Forming a corpus-based list of commonly used medical morphemes for students learning English for specific purposes

Abstract

In a mobile world, where medical students with English as an additional language are provided with access to differing medicine-related materials to broaden their specialty knowledge, they frequently face difficulties in acquiring English medical terminology derived from Greek and Latin morphemes. Advances in digital technology, however, have made it possible to use corpus tools to facilitate morphological analysis of medical vocabulary. This paper investigates a corpus-based approach to resolving practical challenges arising from materials design in English-medium higher education programs within medical fields. Its aim is to re-examine the available lengthy lists of medical morphemes and specify the most commonly occurring morphemes, based on their prevalence in a corpus of current medical texts available through Sketch Engine text analysis software. The list of frequently used medical morphemes will provide an important teaching and learning resource indicating which particular morphemes are worth students’ study time and attention, and making vocabulary learning goals more explicit and attainable.

Biography

Chinh Ngan Nguyen Le is a lecturer in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Department, Hue University of Foreign Languages, Vietnam. She received her Bachelor degree in English Language Teaching in 2013 and is currently doing a Master of Education at the University of Adelaide. Her main research interests are computer-assisted learning, computer-mediated communication and corpus linguistics.