Innovations in curriculum in English for Medicine

Abstract

The Intensive Course in English at the Faculty of Medicine is designed to support the students to cope with their studies especially because many students find the medium switch challenging. The five components that were taught earlier were Reading , Writing, Speaking Listening and Translation .These were redefined under three components as Writing, Speaking and Listening due to the shortcomings observed in teaching/learning and evaluation processes. Writing component was expanded to include report , summary and review writing while Speaking contained a presentation of a research carried out within the course .These modifications in teaching/learning reflect a shift from the traditional audio- lingual method to a contextually based and experiential method and the communicative method1. Evaluation criteria was modified to enable students to coordinate research. Further, instead of grading students according to their levels of proficiency, mixed ability learning process was implemented . This is a novelty in the ELTU courses at the Faculty of Medicine. This paper intends to evaluate how the modifications foster students’ ability in thinking, generalizing and application of language in the delivery of professional service and also to identify the challenges faced by students as well as teachers in mixed ability teaching/learning process. It further hopes to identify ways of minimizing the number of failures in the Medical Course due to the lack of English Language proficiency. The paper concludes with the analysis of the stakeholders’ feedback . 1