Publication:

Common parlance English in an Indian medical undergraduate institution: teaching-learning methods for improvement

Background Author’s experience/ Capstone Project (T2TM, Harvard University) approval.

Methods Harrison’s Textbook of Internal Medicine was the vocabulary source. COCA corpus was purchased for ranking ‘usage frequency’ of words. Background (MCQ.1) versus summative (MCQ.2) assessment has already been published – ‘teaching learning methods’ applied meanwhile is elaborated hereby. After MCQ.1, in sensitisation, 5 glossary options were explained/ offered. Monthly improvement of 1000 COCA ranks were aimed through 5 monthly interim tests (MCQ.T.1-5). MCQ.2 was taken after 6 months. All 7 tests were followed by feedback enucleation. Finally, dictionaries were rated by the participants through 7 questions. Data normality (Shapiro Wilk test) without outliers (Tukey’s fence/ QQ plot) was affirmed. Repeated measure ANOVA was applied. After 6 months, 5000 ranks betterment was expected in MCQ.2 apropos MCQ.1 – in outcome, there was no underfitting/ overfitting (no significant bias/ variance).

Results Sphericity (Mauchly’s test) was 0.85 – so adjusted F-tests (Greenhouse Geisser [eGG = 0.8497]/ Huynh Feldt [eGG = 0.8888] correction) were used. Effect size (h2) was 0.0035 (observed) and 0.0201 (partial). Despite monthly increase of usage frequency rank by 1000, participants’ ‘scores’ were not significantly different in the 5 monthly MCQ.Ts. Dictionary market was not congruent with post-awareness choices.

Conclusions By such a 6-month training, improvement of at least 5000 COCA ranks can be achieved. Dictionaries require in-depth awareness before purchase. Dictionaries D.4 and D.5 could think of lowering the prices.