Peculiarities of teaching professional English to medical students in mixed ability groups

Abstract

The main goal of the Professional English course for medical students is to teach intending doctors to use the language skillfully and fluently in communication with patients, colleagues, while participating in international conferences, seminars and webinars. This goal involves the formation of foreign language communicative competence of the student. To form students’ appropriate speech competencies in listening, speaking, reading, writing, translation and phonetic, lexical and grammatical competencies in professional English, the teacher must carefully select the material and types of tasks taking into account the level of preparation of students, their age and intellectual abilities. When preparing assignments, the teacher must take into account the capabilities of each group of students (advanced, intermediate, elementary), and prepare appropriate multi-level tasks to involve everyone into the work. To organize the work of students in the classroom, such forms of student learning activities are used as individual work, pair work, and group work, which differ from each other by the number of students employed and ways of organizing activities. It is the group work that compensates for all the shortcomings of other types of work and is mainly used to summarize the studied material. The difficulty for a teacher in a mixed ability group is to organize the work of the group in such a way as to meet the needs and interests of all students. The preparation of the teacher for classes in a mix ability group involves several stages: to choose the right interactive method for a particular lesson, which is determined by the purpose of the lesson and the characteristics of the material being studied; to organize correctly students into groups; to consider carefully the structure of the lesson using group forms of educational activities; to choose a problem and outline ways to solve it; to think about the interior of the classroom. When grouping students and planning classes in a mix ability group, the teacher takes into account not only the level of students’ language proficiency, but also their psychological characteristics and needs, creating a relaxed and friendly atmosphere in the group.