Designing an integrative curriculum using clil for medical english courses in the faculty of health sciences during covid-19

Abstract

This longitudinal study reports on the development of an integrative curriculum for Medical English courses, which arose as a need on March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) made the assessment that COVID-19 was characterized as a pandemic and its effects became apparent on nursing students in the Department of Nursing at a State University in Turkey. The curriculum was designed using content and language-integrated learning (CLIL) by the ESP practitioner after observing the nursing students' unexpected reactions to the onset of COVID-19 because of the unfiltered information about COVID-19, as Chiolero (2020) concisely described, "unprecedented in human history" (p. 1). Curriculum development included four stages in this study: preparation, curriculum design, implementation and evaluation. Data were collected using observation of the nursing students and self-reflective reports through triangulation of time and methods and analyzed using thematic analysis. The salient themes in the data analysis included increased awareness, increased confidence, contribution to professional development, the positive effect on mood and feelings, critical thinking, note-taking (because of new scientific information and new term), and ESP practitioner's positive effects on students (n = 59).