TY - JOUR T1 - Does the Consecutive Interpreting Approach enhance medical English communication skills of Japanese-speaking students? AU - Iizuka, H. AU - Lefor, A.K. KW - medical english KW - consecutive interpreting KW - prosody KW - shadowing KW - reproduction KW - japan KW - PY - 2018/04/19 Y1 - 2018/03/30 VL - 9 N1 - doi: 10.5116/ijme.5abe.0eb5 DO - 10.5116/ijme.5abe.0eb5 M3 - doi: 10.5116/ijme.5abe.0eb5 JO - Int J Med Educ SP - 101 EP - 107 PB - IJME SN - 2042-6372 UR - http://www.ijme.net/archive/9/enhancing-english-communication-skills/ L1 - http://www.ijme.net/archive/9/enhancing-english-communication-skills.pdf N2 - Objectives: To determine if the Consecutive Interpreting Approach enhances medical English communication skills of students in a Japanese medical university and to assess this method based on performance and student evaluations.   Methods:  This is a three-phase study using a mixed-methods design, which starts with four language reproduction activities for 30 medical and 95 nursing students, followed by a quantitative analysis of perfect-match reproduction rates to assess changes over the duration of the study and qualitative error analysis of participants' language reproduction. The final stage included a scored course evaluation and free-form comments to evaluate this approach and to identify effective educational strategies to enhance medical English communication skills. Results: Mean perfect-match reproduction rates of all participants over four reproduction activities differed statistically significantly (repeated measures ANOVA, p<0.0005). The overall perfect-match reproduction rates improved from 75.3 % to 90.1 % for nursing and 89.5 % to 91.6% for medical students. The final achievement levels of nursing and medical students were equivalent (test of equivalence, p<0.05). Details of lexical- and syntactic-level errors were identified. The course evaluation scores were 3.74 (n=30, SD = 0.59) and 3.77 (n=90, SD=0.54) for medical and nursing students respectively. Conclusions: Participants’ medical English communication skills are enhanced using this approach. Participants expressed positive feedback regarding this instruction method. This approach may be effective to enhance the language skills of non-native English-speaking students seeking to practice medicine in English speaking countries. ER -