Coordinator: Dr. Letty Chan
Course Description
This six credit English-in-the-Discipline course is offered to second year students studying Pharmacy. It helps students develop the necessary skills to communicate effectively using spoken English within their studies and beyond. Students will have an opportunity to have an oral review related to a topic on pharmacy and pharmacology with a Q&A session. Using research and reading skills, coherent and accurate language, appropriate tone, citations and referencing, students will engage deeply with quality academic content, fostering a thorough understanding and critical perspective on complex medical/pharmaceutical/drug-related issues. After completing their oral reviews, students will use this information to create a video tailored for a lay audience. The goal is to clarify complex health/medical issues or address misconceptions related to the topic that the general public may have due to misinformation. Students will also learn essential word parts in medical terminology, and apply word knowledge and strategies for learning new terms and their pronunciation. Assessment is entirely by continuous assessment.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Identify, critically analyze and summarize disciplinary sources related to a pharmacy topic
- Communicate specialist knowledge for a specialist and or a non-specialist audience
- Evaluate speaking performance of your peers and respond appropriately to feedback
- Deliver engaging presentations in live and digital formats using effective visuals and appropriate language
- Recognise medical word elements; analyse build and define medical terms
Strategies
- Learning how to write an email as well as a forum response in the context of a drug enquiry (genre awareness).
- Practicing how to adjust your language to respond to a drug enquiry from different types of people such as health-care professionals or patients (audience awareness).
- Working on interactive medical terminology tasks with emphasis on word analysis, word formation, terms used in context and pronunciation strategies (etymology).
- Learning how to write a drug evaluation article for a pharmacy bulletin (genre awareness).
- Researching and reading academic research articles and practicing how to paraphrase and how to avoid plagiarism (writing ethics).
Assessment Methods
(with breakdown of percentage weighting of the various methods)
- Independent learning work (30%)
- Oral Presentations (70%)