TEACHING ENGLISH FOR MEDICAL PURPOSES IN CHINA

English for Medical Purposes is so important in China where for several decades, General English has been taught to medical students, owing to the guiding effects of government policy and different public examinations. Medical students in general were not satisfactorily competent in English in the end. The students concerned are doctoral candidates majoring in over 40 medical disciplines. The author has taught large classes with over 150 students. And the learning /teaching duration is one semester (4 months). The purpose of the course is to improve students’ skills for writing biomedical research articles. The course naturally concerns two areas: writing for general purposes and writing for biomedical purposes. The intent of this paper is to establish a kind of understanding among instructors of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) about whether ESP/EMP teaching should focus on disciplinary content language acquisition or on the approach while covering some knowledge of students’ subjects. After sufficient learner analysis, a learner-centered approach has been adopted and received good results.