Physician-patient communication: An integrated multimodal approach for teaching medical English

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propose an alternative pedagogical method for teaching physician-patient communication, which integrates traditional ESL/EFL speaking activities with four main techniques employed in Gestalt psychotherapy/counselling, namely the Empty Chair technique, the Making the Rounds exercise, the Exaggeration task, and Empathic Listening. The existing medical English teaching materials tend to focus almost exclusively on the verbal meaning component of language, with activities aimed at building learners’ knowledge of technical vocabulary, terminology, and fixed expressions to be used in a variety of different contexts and types of interactions. They seem to disregard the fact that communication is an embodied phenomenon involving not just our linguistic and cognitive capacities, but also our ability to properly use non-verbal elements, such as facial expressions, hand gestures, and body movements. The latter elements seem to play a particularly important role to establish rapport and trust in the physician-patient relationship and to promote patients’ compliance. Therefore, a more holistic multimodal approach is called for in order to develop learners’ relational communication skills and emotional awareness, thus teaching them to speak not just effectively but also affectively.