Bridging language and medical education: Integrating Chinese and Western perspectives for high-quality healthcare training

Abstract

For exploring the integration of language and high-quality medical education with Chinese and Western medical perspectives in support of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan for educational reform, this research assesses the potential and challenges of integrative medical education and examines the impact of incorporating a language education intervention through corpus-assisted approach on enhancing students’ critical engagement with medical discourses and their communicative competencies in simulated clinical settings. Adopting a conceptual framework that places Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) within the constructivist framework and using a mixed method design that combines questionnaire, focused group interviews, language intervention experiments and patient care simulation evaluations, this study reveals how a language education trial can significantly contribute to students’ understanding of medical discourse, cultivation of cultural awareness, and enhancement in communication skills. The findings demonstrate the bridging of language education and medical training and propose an integrative medical educational approach for competent healthcare provision in an increasingly interconnected world.