Sam McCarter is a teacher, consultant and freelance writer/editor with special interests in medical English communication skills, and IELTS. He is the author of Medicine 1 from the Oxford English for Careers series. This post, originally published in Dialogue Magazine, explores how teachers of English for Medicine can use role-play to enable learning in the classroom.

Teaching English for Medical Purposes (EMP) to a class of trained or student doctors can be a daunting prospect.

They have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the human body, whereas most of us who teach English for Medicine – probably don’t. And that gap between our knowledge and theirs can lead to a bit of self doubt as we prepare to step into the classroom.

In my experience, there are two things to remember in situations such as this. The first is to remember your role in the classroom. You aren’t supposed to be the expert in medicine – you’re the expert in teaching communication skills. Reminding yourself of this will help you to keep focused on what you’re doing and, just as importantly, it’ll help you to keep calm if you feel anxious or daunted.

Second, remember to use your students! It might seem strange to think of your students as a teaching resource, but it makes perfect sense. If you can turn their knowledge into your asset, lessons will become easier to teach and, hopefully, more rewarding for your students. Here’s how.

Teaching communication skills in EMP is essentially about facilitating learning so that your students can develop flexibility and confidence. If you can create realistic situations where your students actively use their medical knowledge, you will give them very real skills practice for their place of work. One way to achieve this is through role-play exercises.

Role-plays give students the freedom to use their specialist knowledge, which is always good for building their confidence. At the same time, you get to learn from your students; they supply the specialist information, and that takes a little bit of pressure off you. The key to good role-plays is organization – as long you understand what skills your students need, and can organize and control the activities to that effect, you are doing your job.

Communication in medicine lends itself well to role-play activities. In fact, the possibilities are almost endless, as even the most basic role-play can be tweaked to be as complex as you like.

Consider, for example, taking a medical history from a patient. You can create a lesson using just one word – such as headache– and the students’ knowledge. Ask them to create a brief case presentation: a 25-year-old patient presents with a (tension) headache. Students can take turns taking the history from the patient. Give each of them five minutes to take the history, allow two to three minutes for feedback, then follow it up with whole class feedback.

A role-play such as this is made more challenging by asking the ‘patient’ to adopt an attitude (aggressive, annoyed or challenging,  for example). Alternatively, students can work in groups of three so the third student acts as a monitor of the ‘doctor’ who checks medical detail. You can refer monitors to particular pages of medical text books too.

Medical case histories also lend themselves to information gap activities. These activities are where the ‘patient’ presents to the doctor with an illness that the doctor does not know about.  To make this type of activity more challenging, you can:

• restrict the enquiry to different types of headache – tension, migraine, haemorrhage, thunderclap, for example
• set the activity for a specific field, such as respiratory medicine
• make it completely open – let students decide on the patient’s problem themselves.

With these tips and ideas in your bag, there’s no need to worry about what you don’t know. Just concentrate on what you’re supposed to, and remember why you’re there – to facilitate the learning process.

As a lay person rather than a medical expert, you as the teacher are the ideal candidate for getting doctors to ‘decode’ medical language in the way they would need to if they were speaking to a patient. Your lack of specialist knowledge can actually be beneficial in the classroom.

So, be open to role-plays, be clear about your objectives for each activity, and don’t forget to use the wealth of knowledge sitting inside your students’ heads. I’m sure they’ll be happy to share it.

What are your experiences of learning from students?

Jon Naunton is a freelance teacher and materials writer. He is co-author of Business Result, and Oil and Gas 2 in the Oxford English for Careers series. This post, originally published in Dialogue Magazine, explores why non-native speakers are often nervous about conversing with native speakers.

Those of us who have taught foreign execs learn early on that they would far rather speak English with other non-native speakers than with an English person, or – heaven forbid – an American.

Executives with status and responsible positions in international companies often dread encounters with mother tongue speakers that leave them feeling confused, infantilized and at a disadvantage. These two stories may help to explain why.

I live near a small town in France that attracts its fair share of tourists. Over the summer I was in the newsagents when a man in a blazer and shorts approached the counter. ‘Have you got my copy of the Daily Mail?’ he barked. ‘You said you’d keep it to one side.’ The shopkeeper looked at him blankly. ‘My Daily Mail!’ the visitor continued in a slowly enunciated bellow. ‘Have – you – kept – it – back – for – me?’ When the shopkeeper shrugged helplessly, Daily Mail man turned around, muttering to himself, and left.

Recently at our local airport, blessed by Ryan Air, I met an English aeronautical engineer seconded to a British owned French subsidiary. In the four years that he had been there his wife had picked up quite a bit of French but I had to contain my surprise when I heard him order lunch. His French was, at best, basic. Linguistically speaking, his knuckles were scraping the ground. I was left wondering how he got by with his French colleagues.

Now, I know there is a danger in generalizing from the particular, but I won’t let it stop me. I would argue that Daily Mail man and airport man are fairly representative of how the English perform in other tongues. The use of English as a lingua franca has made us lazy, and Daily Mail man would have been raised in the conviction that it was his God-given right to be understood wherever he trod on foreign soil.

Yet in my opinion, their lack of ease in French goes deeper than either consideration, and has a lot to do with how foreign languages are taught in England. Part of the problem is to do with time – language lessons in England receive far fewer classroom hours than most other EU countries, and it is possible to drop a foreign language at the tender age of fourteen. It doesn’t matter whether it is a sport, a musical instrument or any other skill including languages – you have to put in the hours to achieve a decent level. Time and practice are crucial.

The next problem is to do with expectations. When my nephew started French at secondary school, his homework for week one was to learn numbers one to five. For week two it was six to ten. As part of an exciting school project the kids in his class were supposed to create a French market by drawing cards of fruit and vegetables. My nephew’s task was to draw a big pile of plums – prunes in French – which he duly did. I am certain that he will never forget the word for plum but I wonder if his time could have been – excuse the pun – more fruitfully employed. Nevertheless, on parents’ evening the class’s handiwork was displayed as a reminder of the school’s commitment to excellence in foreign languages.

The net result is that the average English person has such a poor grasp of what it is to tussle with a language that he cannot even begin to comprehend where the difficulty lies when he runs into communication problems. Even when English is used as a lingua franca the native speaker can get into trouble. He is less able to modify his language to accommodate the language level of the person he is trying to communicate with. Once he has received the signal that the other person speaks some English no further effort is made to modify or ‘grade’ his language. This behaviour, wrongly classified as arrogance, is due to benign indifference or being oblivious of any problem in the first place.

All this may go to show why most non-native speakers are happier communicating with English as their common language than having to cope with an unaccommodating monoglot who simply can’t recognize the problem. I sympathize with the reluctance of some EU members (notably France) of adopting English as the principal language of Brussels and Strasbourg, thereby reducing the annual billion Euro interpreting and translating bill. Were this to happen it might confirm the attitude of the English to learning other languages and make matters even worse.

What do you prefer – communicating in English with native or non-native speakers? Share your thoughts below.

Annamaria Pinter is Associate Professor of ELT/ Applied Linguistics at the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, UK. Annamaria will be hosting a Global Webinar entitled ‘Towards incorporating learner autonomy in language classes for children’ on February 22nd and 24th. You can more information and register to attend here.

Autonomy is an undisputed educational goal for all. But does this apply to children as well? How can it be applied in language classrooms across different age groups? What can teachers do to help children become more autonomous learners? How does the teacher’s role change?

Why we can’t avoid autonomy:

Each year ever greater numbers of young children in various parts of the world start learning English, and by the time they become teenagers and/ or adults, the world around them will change beyond recognition, and they will need to adjust to new ways of learning. Training them to think for themselves is therefore an essential skill to teach today.

What benefits will this training come with?     

Autonomy goes hand in hand with motivation. If your learners are highly motivated, they will be learning English enthusiastically. Autonomy is also linked to making choices. When children make choices, they will invest more responsibility and effort into whatever they do.

This webinar will be devoted to ideas/ techniques and activities that can be adapted for any classroom. Teachers can incorporate as much or as little as they see appropriate into their practice, and these ideas will work in any classroom because there is also a strong link between developing learner autonomy and attention to individual needs and differences in different contexts.

Here is one idea:

• Get the children to work in groups and take some photos ( for postcards)
• Get each child to choose their favourite picture to write about (with a purpose, e.g. my favourite place to show a friend )
• Get the children to compare their picture stories/cards within the group. Having seen/ read other cards, ask the children to add at least one more idea/ sentence/ to their original writing and/ or improve the writing in any other way.

Autonomous learners  – autonomous teachers?

If we expect children to become more autonomous, should we expect the same of ourselves?    What about ‘Teachers as learners’ and ‘teachers as role models’?              

The following text and activities are taken and adapted from Seasons and Celebrations, Stage 2 Factfiles from the Oxford Bookworms Library, suitable for younger learners.

Activities Before Reading

1. This text below is about St. Valentine’s Day. Which of these things do you think you are going to read about? Circle four words.

Answers: Love, Flowers, Cards, Festivals

2. How much do you know about St. Valentine’s Day. Are these sentences true (T) or false (F)?

a) St. Valentine’s Day started in the nineteenth century.

b) On Valentine’s Day people send cards to the people they love.

c) St. Valentine’s Day is 15 February.

d) Chocolates are a kind of food.

e) People often go out to dinner in restaurants in the evening.

f) St. Valentine’s Day is named after a famous Roman emperor.

Answers: a) F, b) T, c) F, d) T, e) T, f) F

Activities While Reading

Read the text below. While reading, answer the following questions.

1. Match the beginnings and endings of the sentences

1. Valentine’s Day started more than…

2. Saint Valentine was a Christian who…

3. Valentine was sent to prison because…

4. When Valentine was in prison, he…

5. People started sending Valentine’s cards…

a) he helped a soldier to marry.

b) in the early nineteenth century.

c) two thousand years ago.

d) lived in Rome.

e) fell in love.

Answers: 1. c), 2. d), 3. a), 4. e), 5. b)

2. Choose the best question word for these questions, and then answer them.

What / When / Who / How / Why

1. _____ was Saint Valentine?

2. _____ is St. Valentine’s Day?

3. _____ do people send to the people they love?

4. _____ long have people celebrated Valentine’s Day?

5. _____ do people write ‘Be my Valentine’ at the end of the cards?

6. _____ was the Emperor of Rome when Valentine was alive?

Answers: 1. Who, 2. When, 3. What, 4. How, 5. Why, 6. Who

14 February is St. Valentine’s Day. This started more than two thousand years ago, as a winter festival, on 15 February. On that day, people asked their gods to give them good fruit and vegetables, and strong animals.

When the Christians came to Britain, they came with a story about a man called Saint Valentine. The story is that Valentine was a Christian who lived in Rome in the third century. The Roman Emperor at the time, Claudius the Second, was not a Christian. Claudius thought that married soldiers did not make good soldiers, so he told his soldiers that they must not marry.

Valentine worked for the church, and one day he helped a soldier who wanted to marry. The emperor said that Valentine had to die because of this, and he sent Valentine to prison. But Valentine fell in love with the daughter of a man who worked there. Just before he died, he sent a note to this woman, and at the end of the note, he wrote: ‘Your Valentine.’ He died on 14 february, so the date of the festival changed from 15 to 14 February and the name changed to Saint Valentine’s Day.

In the early nineteenth century people started to give Valentine’s cards to the person they loved on 14 February. The cards had pictures of bird and flowers on them – perhaps red roses, the flower of love – and inside were words like these:

Roses are red, my love,
Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet, my love,
But not as sweet as you.

People still send each other Valentine’s cards, but often they do not write their names inside: they just write ‘Be my Valentine’ or ‘From your Valentine’.

Some children give their friends or teachers cards or chocolates. A man will perhaps give red roses to the woman that he loves. A lot of people go out to restaurants for the evening and have dinner for two, and some people think it is a good day to marry.”

Activities After Reading

1. Find these words in the word search below, and draw lines through them. The words go from left to right and top to bottom.

cards, chocolates, Christian, church, Emperor, flowers, love, marry, prison, red, restaurant, Roman, roses, Saint, Valentine

Put the words into groups under these three headings.

Answers:
Gifts – cards, chocolates, flowers, red, roses
History – Christian, Emperor, Roman, Saint, Valentine
Other – church, love, marry, prison, restaurant

Jon Naunton is co-author of Business Result and Oil and Gas 2 in the Oxford English for Careers series. In his final post on helping students with their presentational skills, he offers some tips on how to spice up a presentation. If you missed them, catch up on Part 1 and Part 2.

Download my helpful hints on Presentations – Expressions and introductory phrases (PDF).

Memorable speeches

Once we have dealt with the basics it can be fun to teach students a few rhetorical devices to make their speeches and presentations more memorable. The study of rhetoric – a way of speaking or writing meant to influence or impress people – was once at the heart of a classical education. Nowadays the only people who seem to employ it are politicians. So why not teach our students a few rhetorical tricks which they can easily put into practice?

Here are some ideas you may like to draw on or add to.

(i) Lists of three

For some reason, human beings seem to be hard-wired to use lists of three. There are numerous examples which we can draw from a range of languages:

• “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered) – Julius Caesar
• “Liberté, fraternité,  egalité” – motto of the French people
• “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” – Lincoln
• “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few” – Churchill on the pilots of the Battle of Britain
• “My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It’s their work that I’m supporting. So it’s not me doing it. But I can empower them. I can support them, and I can help them.“ – George Soros (financier and philanthropist)

Remember that in English when we say lists we tend to use a rising intonation on the first items, and a falling intonation on the final item to denote completion.

(ii) Contrasts and paradoxes

Skilled communicators often bring two conflicting notions into collision.

“Man is born free and everywhere is in chains” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Often this is used to humorous effect.

“On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners. Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot water bottles” – George Mikes (Hungarian writer and humourist)

(iii) Rhetorical questions

Rhetorical questions are a useful device for moving from the statement of a problem or situation, to your proposals.

“So what is to be done?” – Lenin

(iv) Adverbs to reinforce an argument

Have you ever noticed that when politicians are giving opinions with little or no foundation in fact that they use adverbs to demonstrate the force of their convictions or sincerity?

I strongly urge you to act now…
I sincerely/honestly believe…

(v) Use of metaphor / simile

Speakers and writers need to use these sparingly unless they can come up with images which are arresting and memorable. Otherwise, it is easy to fall into cliché.

The office was a beehive of activity.
(metaphor – something is transformed into something else)

His horse was as black as coal.
(simile – with as/like – something is compared to something else)

(vi) Extended metaphor and analogy

Analogies and extended metaphors are a good way of reducing difficult concepts to more familiar notions which are easier for most of us to grasp. They are particularly useful for backing up, or illustrating big numbers or statistics.

Sales of her books could circle the globe/go to the moon and back etc. (More memorable than simply stating how many millions of books which have been sold)

The water wasted by farmers in unnecessary irrigation could fill ten Olympic swimming pools. (Better than giving a dry statistic)

$1 million dollars in $100 bills is nine feet high.

Metaphors are common in the world of business and finance. Metaphors associated with sport, war and conflict are often used. Water is popular too: we talk about cash flow, company liquidity and flotation. Sometimes it may be hard to sustain a metaphor through a speech or piece of writing and we should take care that we do not mix them. However, one metaphor which does work effectively is for money laundering.

Money laundering takes dirty money with a criminal history and transforms it into clean money, which looks legitimate. We can talk about the pre-wash, heavy soaping and spin dry of money laundering.

Download my helpful hints on Presentations – Expressions and introductory phrases (PDF).

What are some tips you give students to make their presentations more memorable? Share your experiences in the comments below.