CC BY
0CHALLENGES OF ACADEMIC WRITING PROCESS FOR
MEDICAL RESEARCHERS
Sharipova Feruza Ibragimovna
Tashkent pediatric medical institute https://doi org/10.5281/z.enodo. 10697927
Abstract. Academic writing usually takes place at researchers' works, yet much writing process research refers to data collected under controlled conditions such as the medicine field. Pursuant with recent descriptions of academic writing as a situated activity comes the necessity of investigating that activity where and when it occurs. Many of the methods that have proved useful in the lab have also been applied in the field, and some of the challenges associated with investigating academic writing in publication of own research and experiments are common to any kind of empirical research. However, certain research constraints present special challenges to everyone involved. Some solutions that were developed for academic writing study in Uzbekistan may prove useful in other investigations and might allow new questions to emerge in medicine field.
Keywords: academic writing, medicine, English language, scientific research.
Introduction. Graduates of our institute Tashkent Pediatric Medical Institute report that first three years of "English in medicine "course prepared them for the realities of the professional workplace in English-oriented environment but that the range of tasks they were expected to perform there often surprised them. Some of them discovered that much of their work time was spent not just translating source texts in native language into target texts in another. Instead, adapting texts for different readerships, editing, post-editing, revising non-native users' writing, and proofreading seemed to have become a big part of their brief. Developments in software applications and business processes in many translation companies have kept pace with some of these changes, but relatively little research has been done in the academic writing in medicine to determine how academic texts are coping with the new demands placed upon them. Since academic writing is an medicine activity, there are professional interests and needs to consider. As Buranova D.D. (2023:186 ) puts it, researchers must "balance risks and resources" to achieve academic "fit-for-purpose" writing, with quality demands ranging from modest (e.g., for gist writing of content for personal and professional use) to extremely high (e.g., for imagerelevant or legally binding material). Throughout the process, researchers occupy a central position as experts in the complex system of drafting and publication of target texts (Sharipova F.I. 2019), managing their literature resources (cf. Risku H., 2010) and bringing various types of competence to bear in order to complete the task at hand.
Materials and methods. There are many techniques for teaching foreign languages. But the most tried and tested and still applied is the fundamental methodology, which implies a rather long period of study, persistence and consideration of professional topics in the study of academic writing. The most important aspects in the study of academic writing here are the following aspects - setting the text production, grammatical base formation, formation of professional vocabulary. The method of studying academic writing focuses on the study of professional and scientific environment, which contributes to the understanding of written texts belonging to different
academic fields. When considering the sources for the study of foreign language teaching methods, we paid attention to the most effective and reliable ones.
In the mid-1960s the method of silent way ("silent way") appeared, which assumes that the knowledge of language is inherent in the person who wants to learn it, the main thing is not to interfere with it (Massey, Gary & Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow,2011). For example, at the initial stage of the learning process, students are offered a lot of schemes, tables on which different colors and symbols indicate the sounds that make up words. This method is good for those who like high technology, striving for self-expression. The quality of the teacher's own language skills is practically not reflected in the students. Another unusual method (Pineteh Angu,2013) is the method of physical response ("total-physical response").
At the first stage of learning students do not speak the foreign language, they accumulate a considerable amount of knowledge - they listen to audio recordings, read, learn vocabulary denoting physical movements, then they react to what they have heard or read, but only by action. And only then do they begin to speak. The plus side of this method is that the students are in a comfortable environment.
In the 1970s, the immersion method ("sugesto pedia") was very popular, asking students to create a different reality for themselves for a while: they became other people, with other biographies, immersed in the world of the language they were learning. It was supposed that this would allow them to relax, open up, and as a result their speech would come closer to the original one (Kumar, R., 1994).
In the late 1970s, the audio linguistic method ("audio-lingual method") appeared. At the first stage, students repeatedly repeat what they have heard after the teacher or try to reproduce the audio recording. At the next stage, they slowly added their own phrases to the memorized phrases (Arlene Archer,2012).
One of the most popular methods today is the communicative method. Of the four most important aspects of language teaching - reading, writing, speaking and listening - the focus is on the first two, which are the most important for the scientific activity of medical school graduates. Naturally, written speech is characterized by many complex syntactic constructions, and the vocabulary used is quite complex. The disadvantage of this method is that there is no overcoming the language, no openness to communication, the plus side is a rich vocabulary and a variety of grammatical structures that contribute to the development of scientific speech, but also assuming a good perception of academic speech and even more so of scientific works in a foreign language. Practically all the described methods assume a significant amount of classroom training with a teacher. If we turn to foreign training courses, which are now widely available on the market of educational literature, we will see that most of the well-known Oxford and Cambridge textbooks are based on a communicative methodology combined with traditional methods. Their main aim is academic style in English. There are not many repetitive one-type exercises, students are offered scientific texts, work in pairs and groups, error detection tasks, comparison and contrast, based not only on memorization, but also on logical and analytical thinking, the ability to think analytically and figuratively. And here we come to perhaps the most important point. How to plan the work of studying academic writing for medical students with maximum effect?
Results and discussion. According to the requirements to the program of studying English in a medical university to the results of mastering the bachelor's degree programs in the direction of "Pediatrics" in Tashkent Pediatric Medical Institute on the subject of "Foreign language in
medicine" the graduate must have the ability to communicate orally and in writing in a foreign language to solve problems of interpersonal and professional interaction and the ability to speak and understand speech fluently in the first foreign language studied in its academic form, including professional written and oral communication.
In the first year, approximately 60 classroom hours are devoted to practicing English (this includes: introductory phonics, textbook work, home reading, individual reading, and grammar).
The best-known Oxford and Cambridge courses average 120 hours of class work. The main purpose of textbooks prepared for these courses is to practice academic writing and reading skills. This is, for example, the textbook "Treat and Speak ", which is used in the Tashkent Pediatric Medical Institute in the 1st year. This means that there are about 60 hours left for all other types of learning activities. About 60 hours is taken up is the introductory and remedial course. It is difficult to fit grammar, writing, home and individual reading into the remaining 60 hours.
We have to decide what kinds of activities can be included in the self-study study. It should be said that the program provides for a large number of hours of self-study work. However, the use of this type of work is adequate when students actively show interest and responsibility in learning, when the tasks offered to them are feasible. Systematic self-study work is undoubtedly a necessary condition for mastering a foreign language. But at least two problems arise here. The first is what freshmen can be entrusted to do independently, and the second is how to check and evaluate this work.
The graduate researchers of Master degree and residency program, were asked to verbalize what they saw themselves doing and what was happening during activity in a scientific and professional life. Creating an information gap was difficult in this case, because the researcher responses to the interview was the same one who had made the notes that day, selected the process to be commented on, and to exclude anything unrelated to the academic writing process. Nevertheless, the researchers commented a lot and about a wider variety of concerns than they had done when they had organized their scientific and academic approaches in their workplaces. The comments that indicated metalinguistic awareness of what the participants were doing and why (i.e., not simply descriptions of the scientific articles or research activity) were extracted and coded in an iterative process with respect to their focus. The resulting codes were then grouped into six categories that ranged from a focus on the micro level of words and phrases to the translator as part of a system (see table 1 for a comparison of the comments about the Master degree and the residency programs researchers on ideas of academic writing).
Independent activity can be aimed at acquiring new knowledge. The most regularly applied here is reading. In the process of familiarizing with scientific works, the student practically does not need the help of the teacher, access to Internet resources makes it possible to remove many difficulties that inevitably arise when reading foreign-language scientific literature. The very use of Internet sites, the need to select interesting and reliable educational sources form certain skills educational sources form certain skills, which will be very useful for students at subsequent stages of education.
The undoubted advantage of student's self-study work is that it develops their cognitive abilities, teaches them to use all available modern educational resources, to be creative, to realize their own ambitions. It is known that the knowledge acquired independently, in the course of painstaking work with a variety of sources of information, is assimilated better and remembered more firmly than the information received from the teacher in the so-called ready-made form.
Tasks of such orientation can be individual, for example, aimed at expanding the vocabulary (compiling thematic lists, building semantic fields), and collective (preparation of discussions, presentations, posters). Prepared by the students of the speeches in comparison with the past availability of information, preparation of messages, reports does not lose its relevance, as it involves not primitive copying and reproduction of ready-made data, but drawing up a plan, selecting interesting information, writing a coherent, logically structured text, formulating their own conclusions. The skills acquired in this type of activity will help students in the future when writing term papers and graduate qualifications. writing term papers and graduate qualification works.
Table 1.
Table 1. Percentage of graduates making comments in each category.
Category Examples from the graduate's comments Master degree Residency
Words and phrases it's just a translation, which is useless 57 27
Sentence structures I've turned the sentence in the English 83 76
Text quality that is not particularly grammar English 93 93
Loyalty the foreigners actually uses the 'you' contracted form 93 67
Readership because this is a journalistic article 87 71
Accountability I'll have to put a note in for the author's citation 57 27
For self-study work performance it is logical to offer students tasks aimed at consolidating and systematizing the knowledge obtained in class, so usually these are exercises in grammar, translation of texts, drafting of business and personal letters, advertisements. A prerequisite for practicing pronunciation skills is memorizing a variety of texts. In order to maintain students' interest in this work, a careful selection of material is carried out - they are offered both scientific works and fiction, dialogues and monologues, audio materials presented in a professional performance.
But all these activities require subsequent discussion, analysis and verification in the classroom. The requirement to gradually increase the share of self-study work of students in senior courses is quite justified, but in the first year the teacher faces a significant shortage of classroom hours. This is especially true for groups where the number of students reaches 12-15 people, and it is necessary to listen to everyone.
One of the possible solutions to help students in their self-study work, a kind of control method can be the use of modern technical means, the Internet. As noted in his article "Teaching Foreign Languages in Modern Russia. What lies ahead?" S.G. Ter-Minasova, a particularly popular tool in teaching a foreign language can become an improved model of a cell phone.
The main forms of academic writing of teaching students in the classroom are essay writing, literature review and thesis. In essay writing, the orientation on the interlocutor is minimal, so the preparation of assignments based on monologic speech, can be attributed to the self-study
work of the student. The task may consist in searching and analyzing judgments about a certain fact or phenomenon, in putting forward their own hypotheses, in assessing certain events and problems.
writing of thesis or report
self-report about tool and resource use
self-report on typical scientific article
personal data, sociolinguistic background, and education
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 ■ «Residency Master degree
Fig.1. Frequency of AEs depending on antituberculosis drugs
Literature review involves not only the ability to formulate questions, answer them, but also to compose criticism and positive feedback, to spend time in search of topics to attract attention.
Students are encouraged to exchange ideas, explain their position on various issues, discuss the problem, propose a possible solution, analyze different approaches. To apply this type of work in the classroom, the teacher thinks out in advance the research material, which does not imply unambiguous understanding, preferably related to the sphere of the interests of students or relevant to society at the moment.
Writing a thesis can include two stages: preparatory, independent - search for information, comparison of different approaches to the problem; active - discussion in the classroom, finding the best solution, convincing opponents. As a result of the discussion, monologic speeches summarizing all arguments and counterarguments are also possible.
The standards of the foreign language program do not enshrine foreign language as a compulsory discipline at all levels of higher professional education in the Republic of Uzbekistan. Since modern changes in the domestic educational system are the result of our country's entry into the zone of common educational space of the world, let us turn to the foreign experience of learning foreign languages. In European and other countries of the world foreign language in the system of higher education is not a compulsory subject. Emphasis is placed on students' self-study work. Teaching foreign languages in secondary school is organized seriously, schoolchildren study 1 -2 foreign languages, but in higher education institutions the number of those wishing to continue mastering foreign languages is very high.
The number of those wishing to continue mastering a foreign language and improve their level is small. However, it is necessary to distinguish between the study of a foreign language as a major specialty and as a component of education, albeit a very important one.
Professor Sioux McKenna notes the need to create a unified educational environment at the regional level. Sioux McKenna notes the need to create a unified educational environment at the federal level, to develop an exemplary program for non-linguistic universities and linguistic faculties (Sioux McKenna,2012).
The development of fixed planned results in foreign language for the system of higher professional education. According to Salamonson Y, Koch J, Weaver R, Everest B, Jackson D, in spite of all the differences and specifics of teaching at different faculties, there can and should be comparable planned results of a foreign language for the system of higher professional education foreign language course can and should have comparable or unified sections for all students. Otherwise, the main goal - to achieve greater compatibility of national higher education systems and increase the possibility of graduates to find international employment - will not be achieved.
Conclusion. The availability of regional exemplary programs, elaborated and transparent system of result assessment would certainly contribute to the optimization of the learning process. The available methodological studies and manuals are mainly devoted to the problems of teaching foreign languages in non-linguistic universities, which is understandable, since the applied aspect of foreign language learning is very relevant nowadays. The degree and depth of mastery of various aspects of a language varies considerably depending on its application. However, the problem of working at non-language faculties, where foreign language is one of the main subjects, and therefore, the attitude to it should be correspondingly important. At the present stage of development of higher education system, the problem of foreign language teaching remains very actual. There is a need for joint efforts of leading linguists, specialists in the field of teaching methodology to optimize the teaching process and develop exemplary educational programs that meet modern requirements.
A differentiated approach to determining the optimal volume of classroom hours for teaching a foreign language as a specialty is required, especially in the 1st year of non-language universities.
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