To achieve a high level of professional performance, foreign medical students need to acquire specific language skills. Only knowing the language well enough, they will be able to treat people efficiently. With help of the specific test, students’ skills in English can be evaluated justly.
To develop a suitable test, one needs to consider the group’s specific features well. The given learner group consists of the students from Middle East, aged 18-20. It is worth mentioning that they have passed their IELTS test with 6.0 average grade.
Speaking of the test, it is necessary to mention that it must encompass the specific medical lexis and the peculiar grammar that a doctor can come across.
It is worth mentioning that the test must include the vocabulary and grammar, as well as check the students’ skill to listen to the patient carefully. Since sometimes it is hard to single out the most important message in the patient’s speech, the students will have to practice their skill of active listening.
For this purpose, it would be necessary to create specific approaches to deliver the course. Because of the peculiar cultural background of the students, it would be reasonable to consider specific teaching approaches based on the former.
Taking the course two hours per day along with the medical studies for twenty-four weeks, the students will be able to correlate the language and their professional issues, which will help them to master the language more efficiently. It is important to create a make-believe situation where students could combine their medical practice and the English language, a scene where they would act.
It is necessary to realize the key goals of the learning process. Thus, the demands to those completing the course will be as follows:
- knowing the specific terms and being able to use them;
- the ability to listen to the patient, understand and interpret what the latter says;
- the skill to speak in a correct and comprehensive way;
- the ability to write a medical report;
- the skill to comprehend the reading material quickly.
It is also important to note that the test must correspond to the CEFR scale as well. According to the CEFR standard, the level that the students will achieve is supposed to be the CEFR B1 ‘general linguistic range’, that is, the aim of the curriculum is to make students achieve the B1+ grade level.
Speaking of the content of the test, one has to remember that the test must reveal each student’s skill to read, write and speak in English accordingly to the abovementioned level. In addition, the students will have to demonstrate the skills to listen to particular information, summarize it, draw the most important facts and make the right conclusions. Only achieving this goal, they will be able to treat patients efficiently.
In order to create the test that would embrace the entire course lexical material, check the literacy of the students and their listening and speaking skills, it would be necessary to split the test in several parts.
The first part will concern the grammar, including specific grammatical exercises and small tests. The next one will concern reading and writing, whereas the final part will be devoted to speaking. To rate the students, the 100-grade would be preferable.
With help of such test, the students’ progress will be evaluated in the most efficient way. Since the test considers each aspect of the language, it is likely to produce the most precise and trustworthy results.