Resumen de Enhancing the writing competence in the Medicine classroom with online tools:: Bombay TV
Lucía Bellés Calvera, Begoña Bellés Fortuño
The aim of this study is to analyze the writing errors made by first-year undergraduate Medicine students in the English classroom at a Spanish university. Forty-nine subjects enrolled in the English for Health Sciences module were expected to subtitle short videos not only implementing medical vocabulary seen in previous lessons, but also using Open Educational Resources (OERs), more specifically Bombay TV. This online tool allows learners to practise and develop their writing skills in the target language as well as their autonomy and creativity. Results showed that the most frequently committed errors were, in order, punctuation, spelling wrong verb choice, wrong word choice, pronouns, fragment, word order, articles, verb tense, subject-verb agreement, nouns, prepositions, capitalization and adjectives respectively. Moreover, the negative transfer of students’ first language (L1) occasionally resulted in a lack of grammar and vocabulary accuracy that should be taken into account in order to enhance students’ writing competence in the target language. A final questionnaire revealed that the use of new technologies in the foreign language classroom triggered students’ motivation.
