The
Occupational English Test (OET) is an international English language test that
assesses the language proficiency of health care professionals who seek to
register and practise in an English-speaking environment. The test is recognised
by several authorities in countries like Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the
UK, Namibia and Singapore.
On the OET’s
website we read that this test “provides a valid and reliable assessment of all
four language skills — listening, reading, writing and speaking — with an emphasis
on communication in healthcare professional settings”.
We also find
that a 2013 study by Cambridge English Language Assessment highlighted that
success at OET is a good indicator of workplace readiness in terms of language
proficiency:
“OET test
takers found that the relevance to their professional contexts of test topics
and content […] made them feel confident about their ability to communicate
effectively with patients, carers, and colleagues”.
Because having
good communication skills is a vital part of any health care professional’s
job, and since the OET is a test “with an emphasis on communication”, one
wonders why the exam’s official Facebook page has this post on the
pronunciation of “difficult” medical words:
Surely, OET educators and trainers should know that their students need to master the pronunciation(s)
of a great number of medical terms: teaching learners to avoid using a technical term
because it is hard to pronounce is not going to help them at all. Words like seizure are going to crop up very often
in conversations in clinical settings, so students must know how to pronounce
it and also, must be able to recognise it in running speech.
Seizure is one of a list of 100 words I give at the very beginning
of my two medical English pronunciation books, L’inglese medico-scientifico: pronuncia e comprensione all’ascolto (EdiSES, 2014) and Health Care Professionals Speaking (EdiSES, 2015), as a way to exemplify the
pronunciation of the sound ʒ:
Phonetically speaking, I really don’t see why seizure would be a
“difficult” word. Clearly, spasm (GB ˈspazəm, ˈspazm̩; GA ˈspæzəm, ˈspæzm̩) cannot
be considered to be any easier to pronounce. Quite the contrary. It contains the
tricky consonant cluster sp- at the
beginning and the problematic sequence -zəm/-zm̩
at the end. For some non-natives these clusters can be quite hard to say. Think
of Spanish speakers, for example, who, because their language has no onset
clusters with initial /s/ and no coda clusters with final /m/, might come up
with pronunciations like *eˈspazn/*eˈspazn̩/*eˈspazən:
utterly incomprehensible for English native speakers!
If you are a
medical professional and you need to speak English at work, it is essential that you acquire a
knowledge of phonetics and phonology. This might avoid you putting your
patients at risk and ultimately getting you into trouble — clearly something
that Dr Alessandro Teppa should have been aware of before starting practising
medicine in Britain.
For more on
the topic of this post, see this article of mine or this other post I wrote in 2016.