Medical English book

Academic Medical English for Pathway/Foundation Programmes

Project Number: KD01ISX

The invention

Foundation courses at universities across the world currently develop their own materials to prepare students looking to follow a degree in Medicine, Dentistry or Allied Health. This series of books allows Medical English to be taught first and foremost from the perspective of academic medicine while also reinforcing listening skills, vocabulary acquisition, grammar and structure.

The course books are divided into three Volumes, namely Writing, Reading and Listening. The set of books provides material to cover a year-long course run over two semesters of 12 weeks each, allowing for a week of revision prior to the examinations (150 hours of classes).

The books have also been converted into an interactive, online tools which allows lecturers to create specific, high quality learning materials and activities, as well as track their progress and review their work.  The platform allows authors to continuously adapt and edit the materials as necessary thus ensuring it meets the requirements of the student body following the programme. 

Novelty

Current teaching tools most commonly used today for health professionals focus primarily on English language while embedding health care terminology as a second priority. This teaching strategy, of lessons replete with medical terminology and simple dialogues, fail to meet the needs of the Medical and Allied Health students whose needs are quite different to those of practicing doctors. The curriculum framework developed in the book series is designed to meet the needs of a tertiary level educational institution, while focusing on the academic reading, writing, listening and speaking English skills required of a future degree student.

The online platform allows for a more engaging and effective learning experience and can be used both for completely online courses as well as a hybrid learning approach.  The platforms dashboards provide learners with quick access to their courses while the tools for teachers are designed to offer live teaching sessions either in groups or one-to-one and allows for seamless sharing of uploaded content between learners and teachers.

Applications/industries

The books can be used to teach English as a foreign language to Medical, Dental and Allied Health students while in their foundation year. These students have not yet started their degree when following the foundation year course and therefore have limited knowledge of medicine.

Development status

The first edition of the set of books was created in 2011. The course books are currently in the sixth edition.

The course books titled Academic Medical English: Writing and Academic Medical English: Reading are available for order, both locally and outside of Malta. 

Download an extract of the Course book.  
Download an extract of the Work book.  

The digital tool is hosted on Avallain's Magnet platform. Click here to see what the team have to say about the easy to use set up.

 

 The team is also working on foundation year book sets in other academic areas, namely Humanities, Science, and Business Studies.

 If interested, contact us for further information.

Intellectual Property status

The textbook is protected through copyright. In Malta the Copyright Act applies.

Commercial interest

We are looking for Universities and other research institutions offering foundation courses for Medical and Allied Health students, outside Malta who may be interested in incorporating the books into their teaching practices.

Lead originator

Prof. Isabel Stabile
Mr Omar N’Shea
Mr Edward Wilkinson

Interested?
Contact Nicola Camilleri or the Knowledge Transfer Office


https://www.um.edu.mt/knowledgetransfer/technologies/health-biotech/medicalenglishbook