Abstract
Clinical case presentations are core medical speech events carried out in medical and teaching institutions worldwide among both students and active practitioners. While in most non-English speaking locales these events will usually be communicated in a local language they are also, on set occasions, often performed in English. In order to understand both how and why clinical case presentations are carried out in English in non-English speaking Asian locales, the author visited 8 medical universities and/or affiliated hospitals in 6 Asian countries, observing a total of 36 English clinical case presentations, followed by interviews with 25 different clinical practitioners, teachers, or medical students. The author then analyzed the collected speech event data in terms of Hymes' (1974) SPEAKING model, augmented by Swales' (1990) focus upon 'moves' in genre analysis, and further informed by Bhatia's (1994) introduction of a socio-cognitive dimension to genre analysis, in order to develop a well-rounded descriptive synoptic model of how this speech event is both perceived and performed in non-English speaking English settings. It is hoped that these insights can be further applied to the development of English for Medical Purposes (EMP) materials or curricula and that this case may serve as an exemplar for other inquiries into professional, situated ESP speech events.
Highlights
Introduction and backgroundClinical case presentations are standardized, formalized, and situated core medical speech events
It is imperative at the outset to note that the term ‘speech’ here does not imply reading a written case report aloud but rather that the choice of speech mode demands a great deal of emphasis upon editing and selectivity for prioritization, emphasis, and significance
While a written case report is invariably comprehensive and allows the reader to search out those particular items considered to be of greatest importance, CPs, being multimodal, demand selectivity of content such that a narrative flow is created for the listener/viewer, thereby allowing fellow clinicians the greatest opportunity to comprehend the clinical data in a concise, accurate, fashion
Summary
Clinical case presentations (hereafter CPs) are standardized, formalized, and situated core medical speech events. CPs will be carried out in the native tongue of the participants, many institutions located outside the Anglosphere use CPs as an opportunity to enhance their English skills (and, in some locales, require it) This is a fairly widespread practice given that most medical research worldwide is conducted in English, that most medical professionals will have some degree of English proficiency, and because a large amount of English medical discourse has already built into the speakers’ L1 in the form of specialist medical terminology, often to the extent that standard medical speech encounters between non-native English speaking practitioners invariably involves a certain amount of linguistic code-switching. It is hoped that the resulting data and observations arising from this extended inquiry may hereafter serve as templates as well as hinting of good pedagogical practices for others teaching or learning English within healthcare professions
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