Magdalena Zabielska
Case reporting in medicine – where do we go from here?
The case is one of the basic concepts in medicine and sharing information about new cases of diseases belongs to the oldest forms of communication in medicine. The case is also a discursive construct with specific reasoning and structure. In this presentation, the genres of medical case reporting will be discussed. First, their definitions as well as history will be provided in order to demonstrate the evolution of this genre group. Then some problematic areas regarding the linguistic aspects of the genres will be addressed. It has been shown that they feature an effaced discourse in which cases are studied and diseases are managed, and thus abstracting from the patient. At this point, some solutions proposed by researchers to remedy this situation will also be demonstrated. Finally, recent developments of the genre of the case report will be presented. They include new features which reflect the changes taking place in medical practice, where medical knowledge is becoming increasingly accessible to lay audience and open to perspectives other than that of a doctor. Thus, the presentation will focus on a group of genres of the specialised discourse of medicine, both from the micro-perspective, i.e. the language used, as well as from the macro-perspective, i.e. the contextual factors guiding its evolution. Finally, the presentation will point to the importance of linguistic research on medical case reporting and will outline a new model of the case report that would be patient-centred.
May Olaug Horverak
English writing instruction in upper secondary schools in Norway
The aim of this talk is to present my Ph.D. project focusing on the two questions 1) How is writing instruction carried out in English in upper secondary schools in Norway, and 2) How may linguistic theory and a genre-pedagogy approach to teaching support students in improving their writing skills? Genre-pedagogy is based on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL)(Cope & Kalantzis, 2012; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), a linguistic theory that may be seen as a useful framework in the context of writing instruction, as it focuses on how language consists of systems of choices available for the language user.
The research project consists of three stages of data collection. The first stage includes interviews with teachers and observation of teaching of writing and the purpose of this is to find out how teachers perceive how writing instruction is carried out. The second stage includes developing a survey based partially on theory and partially on the interviews, and distributing this to randomly selected schools in Norway for students to answer. The purpose is to find out how students perceive the teaching of writing, their own writing skills and feedback practices in relation to writing exercises. The third stage includes a quasi-experiment with a teaching intervention based on genre-pedagogy and SFL. The purpose here is to see whether such an approach may have a positive effect on students’ writing skills. Some preliminary findings will be presented in the talk.
Literature:
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2012). The Powers of Literacy, A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing. London Washington: The Falmer Press.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar. London and New York: Routledge.
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