Lexical Familiarization in Medical Text: A Case Study of an Excerpt from Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine
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Abstract
Teaching technical or specialist vocabulary, especially in medical sciences, has been of great concern among ESP practitioners and teachers due to their lack of subject-specific background knowledge. A key strategy often used to enable teachers and learners to cope with such vocabulary while reading medical texts is lexical familiarization. This study investigated the lexical familiarization techniques in the presentation of specialist vocabulary in a well-known standard medical textbook. The samples were collected from a major reference book currently on the reading list of the medical school in Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. The book comprises two volumes divided into 477 chapters. From this, only Part 5: Infectious Diseases in Volume 1 was chosen for further investigation, resulting in a corpus of 3,409,894 words. The results indicate a total of 142 lexical items in 150 instances, classified into seven main categories of lexical familiarization: definition, explanation, double lexical familiarization, complex lexical familiarization, synonym, stipulation and derivation. It is suggested that ESP teachers should take different categories of lexical familiarization into account to prepare learners to be more efficient readers.
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