Abstract:
The Intensive Course in English at the Faculty of Medicine is designed to support the
students to cope with their studies especially because many students find the medium
switch challenging. The five components that were taught earlier were Reading ,
Writing, Speaking Listening and Translation .These were redefined under three
components as Writing, Speaking and Listening due to the shortcomings observed in
teaching/learning and evaluation processes.
Writing component was expanded to include report , summary and review writing while
Speaking contained a presentation of a research carried out within the course .These
modifications in teaching/learning reflect a shift from the traditional audio- lingual
method to a contextually based and experiential method and the communicative
method1. Evaluation criteria was modified to enable students to coordinate research.
Further, instead of grading students according to their levels of proficiency, mixed
ability learning process was implemented . This is a novelty in the ELTU courses at the
Faculty of Medicine.
This paper intends to evaluate how the modifications foster students’ ability in thinking,
generalizing and application of language in the delivery of professional service and also
to identify the challenges faced by students as well as teachers in mixed ability
teaching/learning process. It further hopes to identify ways of minimizing the number of
failures in the Medical Course due to the lack of English Language proficiency. The
paper concludes with the analysis of the stakeholders’ feedback .
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