TEACHING ABOUT STANDARD FORMS OF WRITING: DOCUMENTATION NEEDED IN HEALTHCARE SETTINGS
TEACHING ABOUT STANDARD FORMS OF WRITING: DOCUMENTATION NEEDED IN HEALTHCARE SETTINGS

Summary/Abstract: It seems that in the context of teaching Academic Skills for medical students, ESP teachers have the tendency to overlook one important aspect of teaching writing skills. Though teaching about Academic Writing in the traditional way (starting from applications and application forms all the way down to longer essays and dissertations) is necessary training for medical students, few teachers think about other forms of writing documentations in healthcare settings that are equally important for the medical students’ general training. These types of documentation that is mainly found in hospitals, when doctors may refer their patients to other healthcare professionals or when we simply talk about the amount of research that is equally carried out in hospitals, may be overlooked mainly because, up to a certain extent, these documents may be standardized (especially when we talk about medical certificates, case reports or letters of referral). Nonetheless, they become of the utmost importance when they are looked at from the perspective of dealing with them in a different cultural context. All these documents, used in English speaking environments, may be particularly challenging for non-native speakers, therefore we believe it is important to bring into discussion these types of documents as our students may find it useful to get familiarized with the terminology and the way in which they should approach them. The aim of this paper is to present some ways in which ESP teachers may deal with such topics in their classes. Most of the references will be in the context of ESP classes for Dental students at the “Grigore T. Popa” University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Iasi.

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