The Impact of Teaching Medical Vocabulary Through Collocations on Language proficiency of EFL Medical Students

Teaching technical vocabulary in ESP context is a vital part of English language teaching at a university level and can promote language proficiency of students. This study aimed at examining the effect of teaching medical vocabulary through collocations on language proficiency of EFL medical students. This quasi-experimental study with a pre-test/post-test control group design was conducted on 80 students majoring Nursing and Midwifery at Kashan University of Medical Sciences. At first, the OPT test was used to homogenize the students and 60 students were selected as intermediate students. The students were divided into two equal groups of experimental and control. For four months, the control group was taught the new medical words in isolation with traditional techniques such as such as synonym, antonym, definition and mother tongue translation. In the experimental group, the new medical vocabulary was instructed by providing students with collocations of a particular word through using concordancers and corpus-based activities. After the experiment, both groups participated in a language proficiency test (post test). The results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the posttest, implying that teaching medical words via collocations can improve students language proficiency

Keywords:

Collocations , Teaching vocabulary , Language proficiency , ESP