Abstract
The purpose of this study is to identify high frequency medical Spanish terminology by building a corpus of medical Spanish textbooks and resources. By discovering the most common terms, instructors and curriculum designers can include salient topics in their courses, which will better serve the learners in these courses. To do so, medical Spanish textbooks and resources from 2012-2022 were uploaded to the corpus software AntConc. The final corpus consisted in a total of 26 resources and 1,421,163 tokens (or words). Word frequencies were calculated, and the top 3,000 most frequent terms were determined. A Semantic Rating Scale (Chung & Nation, 2003; Quero & Coxhead, 2018) was used to categorize words as general or technical. The top 3,000 words covered 38.9% of the entire corpus, and the most frequent words found in the medical Spanish resources were general Spanish vocabulary at 68.2%. The remaining 31.8% were medical Spanish technical terminology. The generation of these lists gives instructors and curriculum designers a tool to use in the development of medical Spanish courses that when combined with a patient-centered, communicative medical Spanish curriculum has the potential to enhance learners’ medical Spanish proficiency.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4079/gbl.v24.3
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