A pilot corpus study on nursing students' acquisition of nursing terminology

Article

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the degree to which nursing students in a health science college acquired technical English vocabulary based on a comparison of vocabulary data that appeared in their essays describing what they learned from the English I course over the semester and in two English textbooks. Methods: Based on the concept of corpus linguistics, a computer concordancer program was utilized for word-frequency analysis based on a word list, or 'concordance', which the concordancer produced from the digitalized data from two English textbooks and original essays from 70 students. Furthermore, the extracted words were compared based on the following three categories: 'content words', 'function words', and 'nursing and health care-related words'. Results: The students applied 54% ofthe nursing and health care-related terms learned from the two textbooks. It appears that the students applied more technical terms from the reading textbook than from the conversation textbook (28%of from the reading textbook; 14% from the conversation textbook). In particular, the terms 'nurse' and 'patient' were among the three most frequently used nursing and health care-relatPronouns, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions were the most important function words for producing English sentence structures as indicated by their presence in the top ten lists for the three corpora. Conclusions: From this study, it appears that reading textbooks enrich students' vocabulary more than conversation textbooks as reading textbooks provide a larger volume of vocabulary than a conversational discourse in conversation textbooks. This study on vocabulary acquisition might offer educators some insights into the pedagogy of specific terminology in English for a specific purpose.

目的:本研究は,医療系大学看護学専攻学生の専門英単語の習得度とその特徴を調査することであり,2冊の英語教科書と「1学期間で英語Iから学んだ事」に関する学生のエッセイに使われた語彙数の比較データを基に実施した.方法:コーパス言語学に基づき,コンコーダンサープログラムを用い,電子化された2冊の英語教科書と70名の学生エッセイから各語彙分析表を検出し,この語彙頻度を伴って現れる3つのコーパスを内容語・機能語・看護医療系語彙の観点から分析した.結果:学生は2冊の教科書から看護医療系語彙の54%を使用し,会話用教科書の語彙数より読解用からの語彙を多く使用した(40%:26%).語彙の'nurse'と'patient'が内容語分類の看護医療系語彙リストの中で上位3位内の共通語彙として検出された.代名詞,冠詞,前置詞,接続詞が英文構成上最重要で上位10位内から共通に検出された.結論:本研究から,読解用教科書の方が会話用より学生の習得語彙の種類をより豊かにする可能性があり,これは会話体より多い語彙量を提供する故であると考えられる.語彙習得調査は,教育者に専門語彙教授法の洞察を提供する.

原著

群馬県立県民健康科学大学紀要　1,1-14,2006