Abstract:

In medical English education, the ability to comprehend and produce abstracts of medical papers is a crucial stepping stone towards writing the actual papers. Our study focuses on developing a unique English education support system for medical English learners. This system, which leverages English abstracts of medical articles and official Japanese translation data, is designed to facilitate the study of article reading and English composition. We considered practical feedback from teachers, English teachers, and doctors actively involved in teaching and using existing English learning systems and incorporated their suggestions into the system's functionalities.

Our system was tested in a real medical class, and the results were highly encouraging. The bilingual translation-related functions, implemented in response to specific requests, garnered significant praise, underscoring the system's usefulness. We also considered the system's usage history and feedback from students who had used it and incorporated their suggestions to enhance its functionality.

Our analysis of the system's usage history data provided valuable insights. In the word research task, the function that displayed the full text of the English or bilingual sentence was the most frequently used, indicating its importance in searching for examples of the target word's usage in papers. Similarly, in the task of summarizing the contents of paper abstracts, the function of displaying the English text for each abstract and the bilingual text was often used, suggesting that the system was primarily used for reading the paper. The high focus on the title sentence and each abstract section further supports this conclusion.

As described above, we obtained the learner's behavior from this system's usage history and inferred the functions used and points of focus for each purpose.

Keywords:

Medical English learning, web application, bilingual corpus, English abstracts, study history.