A corpus-based list of commonly used English medical morphemes for students learning English for specific purposes

Abstract

Medical students with English as an additional language often face difficulties in acquiring English medical terminology derived from Greek and Latin morphemes. To address this problem, this study used a corpus-based approach to identify the most commonly occurring medical morphemes in four sources: Stedman's list of medical morphemes; the Cengage list of general English morphemes; the Center for Development in Learning list of general English morphemes; and the Medical Web Corpus—a web-based corpus of current medical texts available through Sketch Engine text analysis software. Three medical dictionaries were used to validate the findings, leading to a final list of 136 specialized medical morphemes which cover 8.5% of the lexical items in the Medical Web Corpus. The findings provide a reliable and useful resource to help medical students with English as an additional language enhance their English medical vocabulary.