Blended Learning: Teaching MedicalTerminologies through Word Clouds

Introduction: Word clouds are one of the most popular forms ofdata visualization; highlight the main ideas by presenting wordsused in a text in the shape of a cloud, with the biggest words beingthose that were most frequently employed in the text. Teachingmedical terminologies especially in ESP courses is becoming achallenge for English Language Teachers. Vocabulary is aninseparable part of any teaching syllabus and vocabulary shouldbe taught in a well-planned and regular basis. It is essential tocarefully decide what vocabulary will be selected for teaching,and what approach or activities will be used to teach it to thestudents. This study tries to investigate the teaching of medicalterminologies through word clouds, concentrating on EMSstudents at Semnan University of Medical Sciences.Methods: Two homogeneous groups of students who weretaking their ESP courses participated in the study in two groupsof thirty, a control group and an experimental group. They wereboth male and female, and their age range was ۱۹-۲۶. standardized English proficiency test (Nelson test) wasadministered at the beginning of the study which aimed athomogenizing the participants. Two groups were taught ۸۰emergency medical terminologies in ۱۰ contextualized texts. Twoparallel medical terminology tests, one of them as the pre-test andthe other as the post-test were given to the students to determinethe effect of treatment on the experimental group. Data wasstatistically analyzed by SPSS software version ۱۸.Results: The results indicated that word clouds have positivesignificant effect on learning of medical terminologies.

کلیدواژه ها:

EPS (English for Specific Purposes) ، medicalterminologies ، word clouds ، (EMS) emergency medical services ، blended learning ، educational technology