English for Medical Purposes

Abstract

There is a large body of literature on communication in medical settings and this chapter distinguishes two partially overlapping categories. The first is literature of particular relevance to English for medical purposes (EMP), a pedagogic and research enterprise, and the second is literature on health care communication, and especially doctor-patient communication. The existence of EMP owes much to the late twentieth-century emergence of English as the foremost international language of science and medicine. The chapter presents detailed accounts of a few EMP courses available. Teaching materials for EMP are based either on locally produced exploitations of authentic medical texts, or on commercially published textbooks, or some combination of both. There is considerable scope for future EMP research. Spoken genres – doctor-patient consultations, case conferences, and medical congress presentations – are also a fertile area for further research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.