ANALYSING MEDICAL ENGLISH LEXIS: A CORPUS-BASED RESEARCH. IMPLICATIONS FOR LEARNING AND TEACHING

Abstract In the last few decades medical specialized communication has become progressively dynamic and prolific with an ever growing number of researchers employing English as a lingua franca. Medical specialized communication unquestionably constitutes a challenging problem with non-native medical students and health care practitioners who are increasingly faced with the need to have an active command of Medical English, that vast set of standardized and non-standardized terms used to describe and represent the changes and the results accomplished in the medical field. My direct involvement in a language trial test aiming at investigating the productive vocabulary knowledge of a group of Italian medical undergraduates was the background that provided the incentive for this dissertation to investigate the language of medicine and devise strategies and materials that were specific enough to help non-native speakers from different medical fields acquire the English language skills they needed step by step. Trying to find the convergence between non-native medical doctors’ vocabulary needs and pedagogy, my research has developed along two lines, purposefully called ‘diagnosis’ and ‘remedy’. Firstly, I endeavoured to ‘diagnose’ which key-words are homogeneously distributed across mainstream professional medical writings opportunely collected in the Medical English Corpus (MedEnCor), a specialized corpus extensively representative of current healthcare domains and biomedical topics. Secondly, I attempted to seek a ‘remedy’ to the non-native learners' lexical ‘impairments’ categorizing all the extracted key-words into semantic wordlists, suitably catalogued into the Medical English Corpus Lexical database (MedEnCor-Lex), a web-based monolingual glossary (www.medencor.com) meant to provide non-native users not only with denotative information on medical key-words, but also with appropriate instances of their collocational and phraseological context and use. Although this writing tool is currently being completed, my goal is equally educational and professional because by compiling a specialized lexical database I do not only mean to make the English used in medicine accessible to the healthcare community, but, first and foremost, to make non-native recipients familiarize themselves with the terms and expressions relevant to the scientific register. An essential skill for their career.