An English Language Obstetrics and Gynecology Journal Club to Improve Medical English in China: A Randomized Controlled Trial

This will be a randomized educational trial of an intensive journal club compared to a self study journal club (1:1 randomization). Randomization will take place after baseline.

The population will consist of 50 medical professionals at Heilongjiang University in Harbin China, who agree to participate in an 8 week educational intervention.

This study will assess the impact of applying English for Specific Purposes(ESP) pedagogy to foreign medical education and specifically evaluate learning in the field of obstetrics and gynecology(Ob-Gyn). ESP is a subdivision of a wider field, Language for Specific Purposes(LSP), defined as the area of inquiry and practice in the development of language programs for people who need a language to meet a predictable range of communicative needs. ESP emphasizes teaching language in context and designs a curriculum around the results of a needs assessment, to more accurately determine which language skills are of priority: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Part of the theory behind ESP suggests that being able to use the vocabulary and structures that students learn in a meaningful context reinforces what is taught and increases motivation. Further, findings from a study by Okamura (2006) that examined how learners succeed in mastering scientific discourse in English showed that they focused on reading academic texts in their field to learn typical writing patterns. This is as opposed to junior learners who focused on mastering the English language by reading English texts written by authors from a breadth of fields. This application of ESP thus reflects how content-specific source articles could serve as rhetorical models and suggests that source articles are able to mediate scholarly writing and learning within the zone of proximal developmental; that is, learners are simultaneously gaining new content knowledge while increasing their skill base.

The proposed intervention is to design an ESP curriculum for medical professionals, specifically Ob-Gyn physicians and researchers at a Chinese Medical University, based on the journal club format and source articles. The study will quantitatively assess the impact of this model on student's ESP language comprehension as well as determine the necessity of the traditional "facilitator" role for a journal club whose purpose is to foster language literacy in non-English speaking universities.