TABLE OF CONTENT CHAPTER I. Significance of the study .5 Scope of the study. The structure of the thesis. Corpus-based studies .2 What corpus linguistics is not?.
Concordance and concordance program. Tokens, types and word families .2 Types of corpus. The use of corpora. The indirect use of corpora.
The direct use of corpora. The influence of corpora on language learning and teaching .14 Syllabus design and materials development. Wordlist choosing criteria. The General Wordlist.
The Academic wordlist (AWL). Establishment of the Orthopedic corpus .3 Data analysis software. Development of the Orthopedic Wordlist. Word‟s Selection criteria.
Orthopedic Wordlist development .35 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. The Final Orthopedic Wordlist. The existence of the Orthopedic Wordlist. The lexical coverage of the Orthopedic wordlist.
The authenticity of the Orthopedic wordlist. Investigating the use of corpus-based vocabulary in teaching reading comprehension for Orthopedic doctors. Summary of the findings. Limitations of the study.
Implications and recommendations. Implications of the Orthopedic wordlist.66 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This chapter is divided into six parts. Part one presents the rationale of the study by showing the facts and the reason from which the researcher has decided to do the research. The second part presents the study significance.
Research aims are stated in the third part. Research questions, the scope of the study and the study structure are also described in the fourth, fifth and sixth part.1 Rationale In the time of globalization, when English has become an international language of the world, it has been considered as a useful tool for communication. In non- English native countries, especially in Asian countries, an English program has been brought into the study program of students from elementary school. The English program for students of primary schools, secondary schools, high schools and the first 2 years in university provides general English for daily communication.
In details, Basic English courses (English for general purposes) are offered to first and second-year non-English majors in four semesters with 30 periods for each semester. The content of these courses are usually topics about cultures, health, environment, life style and so on. After the students complete the Basic English courses, a course of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is offered. The content of this course varies in each discipline.
One of the purposes of ESP courses is to provide students the language in some specialized fields in order to serve their future professional life such as how to communicate using English at workplace. The other purpose of ESP courses is to provide the language, here mainly is the vocabulary, for the students while reading specialized materials in English. In Hue University‟s College of Medicine, the students in four departments have their own ESP courses. Each course lasts 30 periods and is offered to students who 1 have finished four courses of basis English.
Among these, students of General doctor department would choose their major from year 5, for example: Orthopedic, Pediatric, Cardiovascular, etc. However, the ESP courses provided in their last 2 years in university are about general medicine, not aimed at any specific specialized field. Many of them when graduated from university would work in Hue Central Hospital and/or continue studying for higher education. At this stage, the need of doing research and reading more English materials has emerged.
Since early 2011, due to the development and the increasing number of patients at Orthopedic department, Hue Central Hospital, the Vietnam Ministry of Medicine has approved the decision to turn the department into the Center of Orthopedic and Cosmetic Surgery which includes four departments. Along with the change, the number of doctors has been increased in order to meet the needs of the work. The number of doctors has risen from 15 to 22, excluding 4 interns, 4 resident students and 10 doctors who are attending the Second specialty program in Orthopedic at Hue Central Hospital. The need for improving doctor skills is now the first priority of the center.
Therefore, annually, the director has held at least two international workshops at the hospital and cooperating with other associations for many fellowships for doctors of this center. Specialized conferences and workshops have been held with the participation of foreign professors and experts in Orthopedic field. Usually, the foreign professors are lecturers. Therefore English is the main language during conference or workshop time.
The workshops were not only about giving lectures but also included clinical practices. A huge number of surgeries have been done with the cooperation of both Vietnamese and foreign surgeons. As a result, English has been used as a common language in the operating rooms during the workshop time. Based on this information, I have talked to professor Pham Dang Nhat, the director of this center about if there is any disadvantages occurred in those workshops and the process of improving the doctor skills.
The answer was about the lack knowledge in specialized vocabulary. According to doctor Pham, head of 2 Orthopedic center, attending the workshops or joining the fellowship are not enough to improve their skills. One needs to read more specialized books if they really want to achieve good results in their professional work. A problem is that not many books are written in or translated into Vietnamese, most of them are in English, French, etc in which English is majority.
A fact that not many doctors are patient enough to read the English material because they said they have difficulty in looking up the specialized vocabulary in the books or that will take them too much time to find out the word meanings by using the general medical dictionaries which do not have all the orthopedic words written in those specialized books. Even when the doctors attended the workshop, without the interpreters, they could not understand the whole lecture. The opinion has raised about if they have good knowledge of Orthopedic vocabulary, their ability to understand the content would be improved a lot. After the talk I have made with Dr.
Pham and other doctors who are working at the center, I have come to a decision to do the research entitled: “Exploring the use of specialised corpus- based English vocabulary for teaching Orthopedic doctors at Hue Central Hospital” 1. Significance of the study The research is considered to be significant and useful for not only doctors at the center but also medical students who want to broaden their specialized knowledge by providing them all of the Orthopedic vocabulary written in those specialized English books. In all fields of study, the more books one can read, the more improvement they can get.3 Research aims Vocabulary is very important and is considered as a fundamental component in a language course. Normally, the doctors got difficulties in the use of specialist lexis.
In a study of Kirkgoz (1999), he identified that the students‟ major problem was related to their lack of familiarity with the subject‟s specific concepts which prevented them from accessing academic texts in English efficiently. 3 From the issues mentioned above, the aim of this research is to explore the vocabulary in the Orthopedic books suggested by one of the best masters in Orthopedic field and find out the most frequent words that the doctors should know to prepare for their professional life in the future. By doing this, the study is to complete the three following aims: 1. To examine that if the combination of the General wordlist and the Academic wordlist could provide a lexical coverage up to 95% of the Orthopedic corpus created by the researcher.
If the lexical coverage of the two wordlists above cannot cover up to 95% of the Orthopedic corpus, an effort of creating an Orthopedic wordlist specifically focused on Orthopedic-related words should be made. To investigate into the use of concordance program in teaching learners to have more efficient vocabulary study as well as to give some suggestions on the use of wordlist in teaching vocabulary. All of the words found and chosen will be arranged in alphabetical order called Orthopedic Wordlist. When the wordlist is created, another aim of this research is to explore the use of this corpus-based vocabulary into teaching for specialized doctors.
With the effort of the researcher, hopefully this list can be used as an effective tool for Orthopedic doctors.4 Research questions With the above aims and significance, this paper seeks to answer the following questions: 1. Based on a compiled Orthopedic corpus, how can one create an Orthopedic wordlist for using in the reading comprehension of specialized doctors? 2. How can the authenticity of the Orthopedic Wordlist be evaluated? 3. How can the wordlist be used for teaching and learning specialized English for Orthopedic doctors? 4 1.5 Scope of the study This research focuses on creating a wordlist based on a corpus of English Orthopedic books suggested by Dr.
Pham, director of Orthopedic and Cosmetic surgery Center. All doctors of the center including interns, resident doctors and those who are attending the Second specialty program in Orthopedic at Hue Central Hospital will take part in giving their opinions on what books they would choose. The structure of the thesis The study comprises of five chapters: Chapter 1, “Introduction”, includes the rationale, the significance of the study, the research aims, the research questions, the scope of the study and the structure of the thesis. Chapter 2, “Literature review”, gives definitions and knowledge about corpus, words, wordlist and some implications in using wordlist in English language teaching.
Chapter 3, “Research methods”, describes the subjects of study and presents the research methods for data collection and analysis. Chapter 4, “Finding and discussion”, describes the results from questionnaires and from the work of computer. Chapter 5, “Conclusion and implications” draws some conclusions and implications for doctors and medical students in how to use the wordlist best for their reading in their professional life. 5 CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW In this part, there are three sections which are presented.
The first section presents definitions and clarifications of some terms related to corpus-based studies. The second section provides the influences of corpus on language teaching and the way of how corpus in used in this field. Finally, the notions of wordlist and its related issued will be discussed in the last section, section three. Corpus-based studies Corpus, corpus linguistics, types, word families, concordances are the important terms which relates to corpus-based research and will be discussed in the following parts.
What is Corpus Linguistics? Corpus Linguistics approaches the study of language in use through corpora (singular corpus), (definitions of corpus will be presented in part 2. Corpus Linguistics serves to answer the two fundamental research questions: 1. What particular patterns are associated with lexical or grammatical features? 2. How do these patterns differ within varieties and registers? Through years, many researchers have contributed to the development of modern-day corpus linguistics such as Leech, Biber, Johansson, Francis, Huston, Conrad, etc.
Many corpus linguists, however, considered John Sinclair to be one of the, if not the most, influential scholar of modern-day of corpus linguistics. Sinclair defected that a word in and of itself does not carry any meaning, but that meaning is often made through several words in a sequence (Sinclair, 1991). This is the idea that forms the backbone of corpus linguistics.2 What corpus linguistics is not? It‟s important to not only understand what corpus linguistics is, but also what 6 corpus linguistics is not. In a simple way, corpus linguistics is NOT a.
Able to provide negative evidence: a corpus cannot tell us what‟s possible or correct or incorrect in language. It can only tell us what is and is not presented in the corpus. For example, many instructors mistakenly believe that if a corpus does not present all manners to express a certain idea, then the corpus is altogether faulty.