HyperStudio stack focusing on communication in health care settings. The body of data gathered in this study, and the resulting analyses, provided an opportunity for the development of ESP materials that do not suffer from the problem, typical of many ESL and ESP courses, of being far removed, artificial approximations of the reality they profess to capture. Examples will be given for how large discourse units derived from the taped data can illustrate features of conversation and the consultation process which may not be apparent in the short snippets of dialog commonly used. I will also explain how students themselves can be trained to transcribe naturally occurring data and sharpen their listening skills and sensitivity to contextual clues in the process. Hedges, hesitations, false starts, misunderstandings, ungrammatical usages and overlapping speech are preserved so that students get a more accurate picture of how English is used in their areas of specialty.
Students can do original, meaningful research using the videotaped material as data.
The balance of power in medical encounters, for example, can be investigated by having students note, among other things, the number of turns taken and questions asked by the participants. Such investigations would be senseless with commercially produced videotapes, unless the object of study was the depiction of medical consultations as opposed to the consultations themselves. The course was built up around the videotapes but students did not work with them each week. Activities students did with them was generally done in a self-study lab, often outside of the regular class time. The videos were, in a sense the main 'text' of the course.