Sociomedical interaction in English: towards virtual hospital

In the study of Medical English, encouraging medical undergraduates to reflect on the medical content of texts and genres proposed and sometimes imposed by society, as relevant to health and healthcare is an indispensable component for online student-teacher interactions. In keeping with the principles underlying CDA (critical discourse analysis), linkages and comparisons between texts belonging to different genres are explored in relation to set of thematically-related texts relating to health aspects of water and foodstuffs. The paper presents a three-tier model for the qualitative analysis of individual texts and describes their typical make-up in terms of three broad categories of social contexts: individual, community and international/institutional levels. The model of analysis lends itself to quantitative, as well as qualitative, analysis of the ratio between medical and non-medical information in health texts, leading to the prospect of automatic on-line quantification in a computer template/ platform that can guide teacher-learner interactions and comparisons of texts, thus ensuring that understanding of the forms and functions of today’s complex hybrid healthcare texts is kept on a sure footing. Hence, thanks also to the efforts of the classroom teacher, the future global doctor will be empowered to shape his or her own ethical code in way which is likely to be more objective and balanced.