UrgentiAS : urgentielexicon artsenstage : Lexicon for medical students in clinical placements

The UrgentiAS project (abbreviation of Urgentielexicon ArtsenStage, lexical database for medical students in clinical placements) was set up to meet the needs of Dutch-speaking Belgian medical students attending classes of medical Spanish/French/English to prepare for their clinical placements in obstetrics and gynaecology, pediatrics and internal medicine in hospitals abroad. The project provides students with an easy-to-use multilingual medical lexicon, which can help them acquire the vocabulary needed in their placements abroad. UrgentiAS is innovative in that it combines four languages hier staat dat er 4 talen inzitten, maar Nederlands (Dutch) wordt niet expliciet vermeld in het lijstje hogerop, information technology and didactic concepts such as blended learning and autonomous learning. Its main purpose is to ensure that the vocabulary students need to acquire is presented in context, both semantically and syntactically. The result is an online database (partially available on paper) consisting of terminology cards with associative, paradigmatic and syntagmatic contexts. Each card contains hyperlinks to other related terms (near-synonyms and antonyms, paronyms, words of the same class, variants from different registers, geographical variants, prefixes and suffixes, abbreviations, etc.) as well as information on how to use the terms (information on morphology, gender (for French and Spanish terms), register, collocations, examples, false friends, etc). Vocabulary taught in class and from student presentations on domain-specific topics was added as well. The combination of these didactic and lexicographical principles ensures that students have ‘significant encounters’ with the target vocabulary. In addition, the project reflects the specificity of each language. For instance, audio archives with pronunciation of certain terms were added to the English component, as English medical terms are more difficult to pronounce compared with the same terms in Spanish or French. In order to build up the database, we started from the lexical input necessary for the clinical practice that students need to learn for their clinical placement. The database was expanded with a wealth of corpus material: (i) a corpus of protocols of the hospitals associated with Leuven University (K.U.Leuven and UCL) (ii) clinical cases compiled by our contacts throughout the world and by means of terminological searches on the Internet (iii) and documents that contain the language used by and for patients. To process corpus information we used our language institute’s computer science tools for corpus analysis (CATS, Corpus Tools Analysis) and two concordancing programmes. In order to structure the data we developed a flexible database combining MySQL and PHP scripts, allowing continuous content management.

ISBN:978-84-691-5718-3

Jaar van publicatie:2008