Using student performance data to develop an English course for clinical training

This paper reports the development of an English course for medical student s approaching the junior clerkship, the first part of their clinical traini ng. Based on the transcripts of video and audio tapes of six 1-hour session s of ward teaching, the authors first investigated the cognitive demands pl aced on students as they participated in making diagnostic hypotheses with experienced doctors. They then identified the linguistic skills students ne eded in order to achieve various cognitive learning objectives. These inclu ded the skills of using appropriate everyday and technical terms to transla te information from doctor-patient to doctor-doctor discourse, using verb t enses correctly to establish chronology in case reports, and describing loc ation and procedure accurately in reporting physical examinations. In the c ourse which was developed, Video sequences were used along with carefully d esigned teaching tasks, firstly to raise students' awareness of some of the cognitive and linguistic features of the discourse, and secondly to improv e students' performance through practice. The study illustrates how authent ic data from student performance can be exploited to construct a tightly fo cused curriculum addressing students' needs. (C) 2001 The American Universi ty. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.