Teacher Discussion Forums

English for specific purposes or ESP needs not only social English for normal communications, but the technical language for specific occupations. So Medical English means learning to communicate with patients, relatives, and health professionals at all levels, and to know, understand, and use medic...

kk, you're on the right track at the end of your post. Tell students to listen to tapes of English, and record into a seperate recorder or computer, then do A/B and B/A listening. Tell them how terrible anyone's voice sounds at first when they hear it, but get used to it so they don't get scared off...

The site quoted above has extracts from 1903 and earlier

This was before semiotics was thought of. I think 'signifier' is the current term, but could be wrong

The 'Kumars' from TV are great, sure it may not be true Indian, but sure is funny, and the phrases are also worth listening too.

A different problem. My Chinese students all hang on to the final consonant, so 'eat' becomes 'eater' with a short 'er', 'dog' is 'dogger' 'that' is 'thatter' etc. I have to teach them that when a 't' or 'd' is followed by a consonant, to run the two words together, with no pause at all, eg ' the do...

May not be what you are looking for, but for Oral English for my students I buy second hand or outdated fashion mags for about 5Y, cut out all pages with fashion styles, cosmetics etc etc, and hand them out for the girls to look at, and ask them to discuss what they think. A good start for communica...

Depends on what you intend to be the endpoint of your teaching, and to whom. For China, there is a need, as most of the nurses want to go overseas, but the Chinese Nursing qualification is not recognised, so they need IELTS at 6'ish, and often do further language training in the Uni at great expense...

An open question like this is impossible to answer. You should give student ages, class size, prior knowledge of English, texts offered etc, to get a useful reply. However, start very simple, get their confidence, then get answers in short phrases to pick up grammar and context. Keep it to stuff the...

Search the websites for any medical teaching jobs in China. Many universities and schools are asking for medical English teachers, rather than nursing terminology, there is a shortage of FTs. Do you want schools? Some teach English nursing as a programme, so you finish up teaching Oral English and M...

Hi, I have just replied to one on nursing training in Thailand, some of the info may be of use. Start simple, find out the knowledge level of students, group them accordingly if you can, and have fun. Role play in two's or fours is important, use the best students to set an example, then work down t...

HI, I am teaching English and Medical English to student nurses in China, the big problem is that they have little experience in people skills, so something like consent forms is difficult. As suggested, get them used to form filling, simple forms, then to understand what a consent form is, then go ...