Great to have had the opportunity to present SLC’s work at the three-day UK-Indonesia English Partnership Series, organised by the British Council Indonesia and the Department for International Trade (DIT) in Jakarta.
A core part of the event was to showcase British innovation in the sector, with a specific focus on technology and vocational language skills. SLC was selected to present our work in Medical English as an exemplar for how English for Specific Purposes (ESP) content and tuition can be designed and delivered using digital means.
Growth of ESP
The SLC presentation set the context by highlighting the growth of ESP as English has become the lingua franca across a wide range of industries from aviation to maritime to hospitality, as well as the language used to deliver a growing number of under- and post-graduate degree programmes at universities around the world.
Why Medical English?
We then focused in on Medical English, looking at why we wanted to work in the sector, highlighting the following:
- Impact - we were inspired by how learning impacts life outside the course - better patient care, the internationalisation of healthcare, and engagement in global research and discourse.
- Difficulty - we loved the opportunity to develop specialist expertise in an area considered impenetrable by many English teachers and writers.
The challenges of developing Medical English courses
We looked at the challenges of developing Medical English programmes, including:
- How to get the content right
- How to work with different professions within healthcare
- How to work with students who work and study long and unpredictable hours
- How to keep content up to date in such as rapidly changing landscape
- How to support Medical English teachers
Addressing the challenges
We then analysed how these challenges have been addressed:
- Recruiting writers with professional experience as well as ELT expertise
- Developing materials for different professions and well as cross-sector
- Going online to create on-demand content that can be updated, customised and media-rich
- Developing an integrated teaching platform
- Using accreditation to quality assure the courses
Case studies
Finally, we looked at some case studies:
- Combining content from different courses to create a specific course for nurses in a Vietnamese hospital group
- Developing an Anglo-Russian course with Russia’s biggest medical university
- Working with Health Education England and a local partner to train nurses in southern India to pass OET s part of the global engagement programme
- Working with RefuAid to train refugee doctors around the UK to pass OET so they can work in UK hospitals
We were in excellent company, presenting alongside Really English and FilmDoo Academy, two businesses also offering compelling, innovative programmes to the ELT sector.
We hope the presentation went well and look forward very much to building links with ELT institutions, medical universities and healthcare employers across Indonesia.
