Test Banking in English for Medical Purposes (Dentistry)

Activities and questions to assess knowledge in English for medical purposes were designed to incorporate terminology, academic vocabulary and grammar items in computer-based tests for bachelor students in Dentistry at Medical University - Varna. During the two-semester study course identification of key words, core lexical patterns, specific collocations and emphasis on their recurrent use were the selected strategies for student retention of specialized language and improved learning outcomes. Medical terms as single-word lexical units with straightforward definitions are easy to learn compared to collocations and multi-word terms including polysemous adjectives. In the present paper we concentrate on the process of formation of structures containing attributive adjectives which can be quite a problematic and error-generating area for second language learners. The aim of the on-going research study is to extract current lists of the sub-technical vocabulary and the terminological units in specialized medical domains as linguistic resources. The collection of assessment materials into a test bank for specific educational purposes is a customizable electronic resource, imported into the University platform to facilitate the process of compilation and creation of new tests.

By implementing corpus linguistic tools into test design, the instructor aims at providing an authentic e-assessment environment based on the idea of key words in context, concordances, and lexical patterns as per the contents of the selected textbooks and teaching materials during the course. The paper highlights some strategic issues about creating test resources in EMP such as the adherence to a set of selected linguistic items and grammatical structures based on their frequency in the domain.