Page 19 - Foundation Programs in Higher Education: Gateway to Success

Omar N’Shea

‘Integrating Academic English Teaching into Medical Foundation
Curriculum’
Current Medical English courses in EFL and pre-tertiary English language
frameworks focus mainly on practice-specific lexical gain and patient-
doctor spoken interaction. In fact, most textbooks available for tutors and
learners from mainstream and specialised publishers target already-qualified
physicians, nurses, and other health workers who need to practice their
professional skills in an English language environment. Academic English
teaching materials, on the other hand, more often than not focus on
disciplines traditionally associated with essay writing such as the humanities
and social sciences. This leaves out a large segment of the EFL market, namely
students on pre-tertiary foundation programmes who wish to study Medicine
and Surgery at undergraduate level and who have little to no experience in
dealing with discipline-specific textbooks, peer-reviewed journal articles,
long essay writing, lectures, and so on. Based on a complete assessment of
a three-year teaching period using a mixed body of materials (pre-existing on
the EFL textbook market and bespoke materials based on available teaching
documents), followed by a tracer study to assess the performance of the
learners in their degree course, it became clear to us learners were not
being effectively prepared for success in their undergraduate studies. During
follow-up feedback sessions, the learners themselves reported a low-degree
of engagement stating, in most cases, that they felt the materials were
not relevant to the immediate and long-term academic needs. Using these
insights, we proposed to design a study programme integrating academic
study skills with core science subjects. In this paper, we will first discuss the
pedagogical and philosophical rationale underlying the proposed framework,
and then the methods through which the programme was implemented.
Finally, we will present a work-in-progress data set to show the results of
the learners’ performance in the first two years of their degree programme.

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