Speakers
Description
At Hiroshima University, first-year students usually study general English before beginning discipline-specific courses. This poster reports on a project that introduces a healthcare English component into a first-year course on the university’s medical campus. As these students have not yet developed the specialist knowledge of their future professions, the project explores how healthcare English can be introduced in ways that remain accessible and meaningful prior to formal disciplinary study. Two key challenges shape the design: the first is engaging learners preparing for a range of professions, including medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy and physical therapy; the second is avoiding reliance on technical background knowledge. To address these challenges, the course foregrounds specialist–patient dialogues rather than technical texts, positioning patient-facing communication as the entry point into healthcare English at this stage of learners’ development.
Key vocabulary is identified from these dialogues and supporting materials and organised into a pedagogic word list of approximately 600 items, ensuring vocabulary is embedded in relevant discourse while supporting recycling and cumulative exposure across the materials. The poster outlines the principles guiding word selection and case design, presents initial reflections from pilot implementation, and considers implications of this approach for early-stage healthcare English instruction in similar pre-specialist contexts.