In this article, we summarize our work on creating a medical English word list for students at Hiroshima University and its delivery, first via a set of courses and materials, and then through the development of software that includes the list. Through the software, students have the means to consolidate their acquisition of the word list as well as new words that they encounter in their future medical research.
The medical English word list has been developed via vocabulary-rich medical English materials designed by our team through research at the university’s medical school and corpus analysis of key reference books. The materials themselves have been taught through a mixture of a learning management system and in-person classes. We summarize this process and then focus on the development of the medical English word list and a further list of word parts, designed to sensitize students to the meanings contained within complex medical terms.
In the final part of the article, we describe how the new software incorporates the medical English word list, how it can be used to analyze the words in a text, and how the texts themselves can be saved for further study and as aids to the acquisition of medical terms during and beyond the students’ medical English courses.