This paper describes the preliminary research and equipment design for a project to develop materials that aid professional staff to communicate in English at a Japanese hospital. A key aim is to make and organize videos in English supported by pedagogic tasks. In the paper, a situation, resource, and needs (SiReN) analysis is used, with a focus on technological resources and the English language needs of teams in hospitals.
In terms of the situation under study, the authors discuss the difference between the use of English in hospitals where the primary language of communication is English in contrast to hospitals in Japan, in which English is used as a Lingua Franca.
Regarding resources, the research team has built a mobile recording studio which can be used both in or near a hospital. It has been designed for high-quality audio and video recording, and it includes a simple teleprompter to aid in the reading of scripts. In addition, consideration is given to how materials can be organized on a learning management system that can be made available to staff.
In relation to needs, two hospital departments, gastroenterology and neurosurgery, are used to examine some of their communicative needs in English, and two treatments are described: polypectomy (the removal of small tumors from the colon) and the clipping of a cerebral aneurysm (a balloon-like weakness in the wall of a blood vessel in the brain). In the analysis that follows, several implications emerge: By researching a small number of departments, a variety of communicative needs in shared hospital areas can be included, such as in-patient care and scanning; two types of videos can be made, with one type describing processes and procedures, and the other providing verbatim instructions; hospital documents for patients can be collected and translated, then used as the basis for video scripts.