Speakers
Description
Many medical English teachers prefer using commercial textbooks to making their own materials. Asked why, they will rarely claim to have found the perfect textbook. Rather, they will say things like “Making original materials takes too long,” “I don’t have enough medical knowledge,” “A textbook is neater than piles of handouts,” or “Making listening materials is too difficult.”
These arguments used to hold water, but in the AI age they are full of holes, leaking rapidly, and on course to sink. In fact, it has never been easier or cheaper to create high-quality materials tailored to your learners’ exact needs, and to your institution’s curriculum. Access to AI chatbot assistants has already slashed the time needed to create templates, write and edit texts, and design classroom tasks; professional-looking documents can easily be created and shared in the paperless format that most students now prefer; and online tools allow even the most technologically-challenged teacher to create high-quality listening materials without actually calling on any human speakers.
In this presentation, two such “technologically-challenged” teachers will describe how they experimented with unfamiliar technology to create a 14-week course on history taking in English for first-year students. The goal is not to promote specific tools or to list all the options available, and the speakers will not deny that AI-generated material needs to be viewed skeptically and checked carefully. Rather, the goal is simply to raise awareness of how easy it now is to create original classroom materials to teach medical English, and to encourage more teachers to explore that option.