Action Research in English for Specific Purposes: English Language for the Medical Students in Bangladesh

Abstract

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has flourished to meet the growing demand of the academic and professional learners.  Since the tertiary level of education is the concern, ESP can be a way out to teach English as a second or foreign language. At the end of primary, secondary and higher-secondary level of English language education, a learner is expected to have a good command of the four skills of English language.  Even though, if one fails to have the proficiency, s/he needs intensive teaching. ESP has very thoughtful and research-oriented arrangement for language teaching by needs analysis, formulation of goals and objectives, specific syllabus design, appropriate material development, effective teaching, and accurate evaluation.

In ESP, the practitioner, who is a needs analyst, is also a setter of goals and objectives, a syllabus designer, a material developer and a teacher as well as an evaluator.  For this reason, there lies no gap among the steps of a whole project of language teaching. ESP learners are mature and more enthusiastic. In ESP, syllabus design depends on the analysis of the language used in the target area of learners. Sometimes, the syllabus designers consider the learners’ opinions.  Teaching materials are collected from the area of job or study of the learners. Interests, target and levels of previous knowledge of the ESP learners usually vary. Thus, for an individual group, a tailor-made ESP course is, therefore, suitable. The goal of the present action research is to design an English language course for the medical students.

In my professional life, I used to teach English language to the medical students. Since I taught them with general English language materials, I observed a gap between their target area and English language. “They cannot relate their achieved language knowledge to the medical context. For example, in a class, when they are asked to solve some exercises of active and passive voices, they can solve properly. But when they define terms like hypertension, or nervous system, they confidently use called/ call/ calls instead of is/ are called. Medical students are really motivated by their subject specific texts. It is my assumption that, specific English language course can solve the problem by bridging the gap between their knowledge and their proficiency language.” (Sharmin, L.  -2011). On the basis of the information of data, collected from one preset questionnaire, I have analyzed needs and formulated an ESP course obtaining vocabulary, topic and examples from medical context. I found the classes more effective and interesting with these special materials. I have collected another set of data. I compared the data and found the results very optimistic.