Your Cart

• Log in

• Related Products
• Parent
  • • International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences
• Associated
  • • The Impact of EU Post-Enlargement Labour Migration on Social Attitudes of Migrant Workers
  • • Causal Attributions of Infidelity of Latvian Residents with Different Kinds of Infidelity Experience
  • • Exploring the Use of Qualitative Research Methodology in Conducting Research in Cross Cultural Management
  • • Moving Beyond Evaluation Utilization Theory to Embrace a Comprehensive Theory of Influence
  • • The Digital Musician
  • • The Family-in-Environment
  • • Property Tenure and Local Economic Development
  • • The Macroeconomic Effects of Changes in Petrol Prices
  • • Brain Abnormalities in the Criminal Justice System
  • • Residential Satisfaction with Housing in the Malaysian Context
  • More →

Temporal Conjunctions in Medical Case Presentations: Examples from Case Presentations by Native and Taiwanese Physicians

By Hsuan Hung, Jing-Jane Tsai and Pi-Ching Chen.

Published by The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Despite the long-standing interest in L2 writing and the new academic trend of English for medical purposes, research studies that explore language features of medical writing by physicians in Taiwan remain scant, and little pedagogical instruction has been suggested for case report writing instruction, not to mention the instruction of case presentation, which is a core section within a case report. This study created a corpus of 40 case presentations from international and Taiwan-published medical journals. Hand-tagged analysis and a concordance program were used to explore the temporal conjunctions by L1 and L2 writers. The findings indicate that although both of native and Taiwanese physicians use similar conjunctions, native physicians use clear time phrases (e.g. 2 days after admission) to describe chronological medical events while Taiwanese writers usually use conjunctions without a mark of time (e.g. after admission) to describe the order in medical events. In addition, the differences in using conjunctions are the patterns and the locations. The findings in this study are particularly useful to Taiwanese medical writers because it not only allows them to gain a better understanding of international case presentations but also gives them a better insight of word usages in case presentations for publication.

International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Volume 5, Issue 2, pp.255-264. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 645.742KB).

Hsuan Hung

Graduate Student, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

Dr. Jing-Jane Tsai

National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

Dr. Pi-Ching Chen

Chang Jung Christian University, Taiwan