The Development of a Needs-Based Curriculum to Teach Medical English

This study elucidates a four-year longitudinal study of developing a needs-based curriculum to teach medical English as a foreign language. Following Benesch (2001, 1996), a critical needs analysis was conducted to identify medical students’ needs to develop a needs-based curriculum. One of the salient themes in the needs analysis was that to most of the medical students learning, medical English was challenging while they were acquiring sub-technical vocabulary and because of their unfamiliarity with the genre of medical research articles given that they had little formal instructional support in content courses in the Faculty of Medicine to improve their medical English competency. Thus, in this study, in light of a critical needs analysis, we aim to develop needs-based curriculum with medical students’ involvement in the learning process by adopting critical pedagogy and enact through the following four stages for a medical English course: preparation, curriculum development, curriculum implementation and curriculum evaluation. To evaluate the curriculum and understand how well the learners gain the intended outcomes with the planned activities, we carried out a formative evaluation. We also conducted a summative evaluation to investigate learners’ perceptions on their learning experience and to determine at which level the students achieved the learning outcomes in the following aspects: course content, teaching process, ESP practitioner and student relationship, teaching style and attitudes towards assessments of medical English course.