In conclusion, this study as an action research illustrates the process in which four language-trained teachers cooperated to develop an integrated content-based nursing English program. It further stresses the idea that nursing English can be integrated into a regular general English course, and the integration is helpful to and welcomed by most of the EFL learners. However, this study has several limitations, and these indicate issues to be pursued in future research. First of all, course themes were selected by the four teachers based on their own analysis of learners’ future career needs, rather than depending on the participants’ learning needs and interests.
Future research may take learner needs into greater consideration by conducting a needs analysis survey so that the program can be truly tailor-made for students.
Second, Baumfield et al. (2008) mentioned that insights gained from a cycle of action research may encourage the teacher-researcher to redefine the problem and to take a further step to plan another cycle of action research to address the problem. This study only presents one cycle of action research and does not indicate how the four teacher-researchers address the problems they encountered and the suggestions they received from the participants and the nursing
faculty by designing another nursing English program. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the findings presented in this study can draw ESP teachers’ attention to some suggestions for developing nursing English programs, and also result in more action research to be conducted as a follow-up cycle.
Lastly, EFL teachers often have limited subject knowledge for CBI (Cloud, 1998), and the weaknesses of the program as highlighted in the post-instruction seminar by the nursing faculty also pointed out the importance of having nursing professionals join the team of course development. Ideally, many weaknesses would have been spared if there had been nursing professionals working or commenting on the program design prior to its implementation.
Future research focusing on developing a content-based nursing English program should thus recruit several nursing faculty for help with the design. If nursing faculty are involved in the process of curriculum development, they can give immediate responses to the course content to maximize the benefits of the content-based ESP program. Support from nursing faculty may also turn many language-trained teachers’ “professionally intimidating [ESP]
experience” (Cammarata, 2009, p. 559) into a good and fruitful journey.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The design of the nursing English program was initially presented at the inter-collegiate teacher seminar entitled Developing Nursing-based General Education Curriculum, with partial findings
of this study orally presented at the 2010 Conference on Improving Teaching and Research Quality of General Education hosted by Hsin Sheng College of Medical Care and Management. The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments on the previous drafts of this article.
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