A Model approach to analyzing discourse in medical articles

Abstract

ABSTRACT DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN MEDICAL ARTICLES YILDIZ, ZİYA M.A. in English Language Teaching Supervisor Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sabri KOÇ February, 1992. This study aims at developing a model approach to analysing medical discourse for the purpose of enabling medical students and doctors to adopt and improve their reading comprehension and writing skills for medical articles in current journals of medicine. In Chapter I, the needs of medical students and doctors in terms of their reading and writing skills for understanding and writing medical articles have been identified. In Chapter II, the characterististics of scientific discourse and the approach to analyzing the discourse of newspaper articles developed by van Dijk (1985) have been surveyed. Adapting van Dijk's approach to discourse analysis, a new model for analyzing medical discourse has been developed by scanning 93 articles published in five different medical journals in terms of their thematic and schematic structures.In Chapter III, the components of our suggested approach to analyzing medical discourse have been explained in detail and it is applied to a selected medical article to illustrate how it works. It is seen that the model approach has been able to cope with most of the common characteristics of medical discourse. In Chapter IV, a summary of the study is presented with some practical suggestions and remarks for further research.