Discussions and Oral Presentations as Teaching Material in English for Medicine Zorica Antic Natasa Milosavljevic English language department Faculty of Medicine University of Nis

Introduction  The students at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Nis have specific demands for English. They want to communicate with certain groups of people about fairly specific topics.  They have a desire to publish medical articles in respected journals, participate in international conferences and practice abroad.  First of all, when they graduate, they want to be able to speak medical English language.

Students’ needs  The course in English for Medical purposes has to respond to students’ needs.  Teacher should provide opportunities for learning the language through communicative tasks.  In communicatively dynamic classes, students are encouraged to: - take an active role, -read beyond the prescribed textbooks, - use language creatively, purposefully and interactively.  Both professional and academic level of language are included.

Professional level of language  In order to study professional language appropriately, the specific features of medical language should be known: - Objectivity - Clarity - Impersonal style and passive  The course starts with general medical topics and moves on to more specific language.  Students are first introduced to medical prefixes, suffixes, specialized vocabulary and terminology.  One of the goals is to learn the tools of word analysis which will make the understanding of complex medical terminology easier.  The professional level also includes symmetric and asymmetric communication.

Academic level of language  Students learn how to write in accordance with the IMRaD structure, starting from abstracts and moving on to other parts - Introduction, Materials/Methods, Results and Discussion.  Different opinions about the IMRaD structure: - It limits the author in terms of creativity and freedom of expression. - It is very useful for presenting important information in a systematic way.

From written to oral discussion  The Discussion section is very important in the research article and usually the most difficult to write.  In this section, the obtained results are explained and compared with relevant findings of other authors.  It contains scientific interpretation of the findings and evaluation of the research.  Also generalization of the results obtained, their implications, and their possible applications, as well as limitations of the study.

Oral discussions and presentations – conference English  Speaking allows a greater freedom of personal expression to the author, as opposed to the detached style of writing.  Conference language is condensed version of the work presented.  It tends to stress the novelty and interestingness of the study described.

 Oral discussions are dynamic, active and unpredictable.  A link between special and general language.  Oral discussion is hearer-tailored.  Conference is also a social occasion: people establish contact and exchange views and news (small talks).

 The implementation of oral presentation skills into the teaching process and the use of discussions and oral presentations as teaching material have numerous advantages.  Most importantly, communicative competence is developed by bridging the gap between language study and language use.

 Speaking face-to-face has important effects on expressions used as part of language-in-action: - numerous occurrences of personal style in the use of personal pronouns and adjectives (‘personals’) - typical of non-scientific language and closer to spontaneous spoken discourse.  The first and second person pronouns occur more frequently in the talks than in written articles.  First person singular is widely used: - I think I can say that … - I’d like to show you … - I don’t think this is true… - I don’t believe …

 Second person pronoun is used because the speakers often address the audience directly in order to draw their attention: - As you can see here, the results show … - As you already know …  The use of imperative with let’s: - Now let’s come back to this problem … - Let’s see what we are talking about …  By these devices, the speaker avoids giving the impression of holding a monologue. Personal and attitudinal elements thus play an important part in interaction with the audience.

Conclusion 1. Teacher’s role as an organizer, facilitator, adviser – the teacher lets the students apply their own learning strategies and guides them through the process, ensuring fluency and active use of English. The main goals are to create an interactive and motivating learning environment. 2. Student-centered approach – students decide on the topics for their presentations. 3. Context and content-based learning – topics are chosen from students’ medical subjects, case studies, case reports..

4. Project-based learning – working on a project, researching and gathering information are valuable for developing critical thinking, collaboration, and improving communication. Students have an opportunity to apply knowledge they have acquired both from their English language lessons and from their medical subjects. 5. All language skills are included: reading – to gather information, discriminate on the relevant data; writing – making notes, drafts, final textual material to be presented; listening – students in the audience listen to the presentation and prepare to participate in speaking about the topic (in Q&A sessions). 6. Regular feedback – the teacher estimates the quality of the presentation in linguistic terms, whereas the students evaluate the medical content. 7. Shared learning – By providing feedback, students are actively included throughout the whole process. Both the students and the teacher learn from one another.