Journal of Languages for Specific Purposes (Mar 2018)
ARZTBRIEFE IM MEDIZINISCHEN FACHSPRACHENUNTERRICHT DEUTSCH. EINE KONTRASTIVE TEXTSORTENANALYSE / THE GENRE OF MEDICAL REPORT IN TEACHING MEDICAL GERMAN. A CONTRASTIVE GENRE ANALYSIS
Abstract
Medical report represents an important written genre in medical communication including medical history, present symptoms, findings and treatment measures. Medical histories are based on patient interviews and represent a summary of both the previous medical findings and the information gained by asking patients targeted questions. While interviewing them, physicians follow a specific sequence of questions to provide a structure for a logically comprehensible medical history, which facilitates an accurate diagnosis. The current study aims to describe and compare the genre of ‘medical report’ and especially its part ‘medical history’ in Germany, Austria and Hungary as well as to detect phraseological patterns typical of the genre in the three languages. The study was carried out on a corpus of medical reports dating from 2012-2016 and provided by the Clinical Centre of the University of Pécs (Hungary) as well as by hospitals from different federal states of Germany and Austria. Terms and phraseological units were investigated using concordance and statistical analysis.The results of the study prove that knowing the structural norms and phraseological units improves communication between physicians, what is more, it is required for their participation in the discourse community as competent members in both the native and the foreign language. Therefore, Hungarian medical students learning Medical German should be introduced into writing medical reports in German, using authentic samples. The knowledge of generic norms applied in Germany and Austria conveys additional intercultural competence skills, which are essential for the written communication with their foreign colleagues.
