This book integrates insights from dialogic theory and systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to extend our understandings of engagement in medical research articles, going beyond notions of the role of verbal dialogue to encompass mathematical and visual semiotics and consider text not just as language but as multisemiosis. The volume begins by outlining the engagement framework and offering a brief overview of historical developments in medical research discourse. This discussion culminates in the introduction of the corpus used for analysis, drawing on original research articles from key medical journals to explore verbal, mathematical, and visual engagement in turn. A subsequent chapter brings these perspectives together to demonstrate intersemiotic engagement across different stages and phases of the medical research article and how such resources work together to construe and maintain the authoritative position commonly associated with medical discourse. The book looks ahead to engagement in other related disciplinary fields and future directions for work on multisemiosis and medical research discourse more generally. This book will be of particular interest to graduate students and researchers in multimodality, critical discourse analysis, applied linguistics, SFL, and science education.

The focus of this volume is on medical discourse, a domain of language which deserves closer scrutiny by academics as well as practitioners, due to its increasing relevance and pervasiveness in modern society. Despite the wealth of publications dealing with specialized or academic discourse and its rhetoric, few of these are devoted specifically to medical discourse. This book seeks to redress the balance by bringing together a number of studies that bear witness to the widespread interest in medical texts shown by linguists and professional communities around the world. The volume is divided into two main parts: the first targets medical discourse in its spoken dimension, while the second contains various analyses of written texts. The theoretical perspectives and individual case studies presented here reflect the wide range of methodological approaches and theoretical issues that characterise current research in the field.

This book analyses medical communication from a range of innovative perspectives, not only from a merely linguistic angle, but also from a social and cultural standpoint, with an emphasis both on the doctor-patient relationship and on the social relevance of the other communicative links existing between the many communities involved in this type of interaction.

While health literacy is a relatively new multidisciplinary field, it is vital to the successful engagement with and communication of health with patients, caregivers, and the public. This book ‘New Directions in Health Literacy Research, Theory, and Practice’ provides an introduction to health literacy research and practice and highlights similar scholarship in related disciplines. The book is organized as follows: the first chapter explains the still-evolving definition of health literacy; the next three chapters discuss developments and new directions in health literacy research, then a further two chapters are devoted to developments and new directions in health literacy theory. Two chapters explore health literacy interventions for vulnerable populations; four chapters cover health literacy leadership efforts; six chapters describe developments and new directions in disciplines that are similar to health literacy; and six chapters portray diverse health literacy practices. A preface from Richard Carmona M.D., the former U.S. Surgeon General, is included in the book. Although the book is intended primarily for health literacy researchers, practitioners and students, the diverse topics and approaches covered will be of interest to all healthcare and public health researchers, practitioners, and students, as well as scholars in related fields, such as health communication, science communication, consumer health informatics, library science, health disparities, and mass communication. As Dr. Carmona concludes in his preface: ‘This is essential reading for all health practitioners.’

Drawing on a growing consensus about the importance of community representation and participation for ethical research, community engagement has become a central component of scientific research, policy-making, ethical review, and technology design. The diversity of actors involved in large-scale global health research collaborations and the broader ‘background conditions’ of global inequality and injustice that frame the field have led some researchers, funders, and policy-makers to conclude that community engagement is nothing less than a moral imperative in global health research. Rather than taking community engagement as a given, the contributions in this edited volume highlight how processes of community engagement are shaped by particular local histories and social and political dynamics, and by the complex social relations between different actors involved in global public health research. By interrogating the everyday politics and practices of engagement across diverse contexts, the book pushes conversations around engagement and participation beyond their conventional framings. In doing so, it raises radical questions about knowledge, power, expertise, authority, representation, inclusivity, and ethics and to make recommendations for more transformative, inclusive, and meaningful community engagement. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Critical Public Health journal.

As its title suggests, this book is a selection of papers that use English corpora to study language variation along three dimensions – time, place and genre. In broad terms, the book aims to bridge the gap between corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics and to increase our knowledge of the characteristics of English language. It includes eleven papers which address a variety of research questions but with the commonality of a corpus-based methodology. Some of the contributions deal with language variation in time, either by looking into historical corpora of English or by adopting the method known as diachronic comparable corpus linguistics, thus illustrating how corpora can be used to illuminate either historical or recent developments of English. Other studies investigate variation in space by comparing different varieties of English, including some of the “New Englishes” such as the South Asian varieties of English. Finally, some of the papers deal with variation in genre, by looking into the use of language for specific purposes through the inspection of medical articles, social reports and academic writing.

The revised Tomorrow′s Doctors makes it clear that doctors need to be aware of their responsibilities as scholars and scientists and it is therefore vital that students develop excellent research skills. Whilst there are many ′research skills′ books, medical students frequently struggle with understanding the difference between the practices of research, audit, service evaluation, systematic and narrative reviews and when and how to apply them. This book addresses the kinds of questions novice investigators always ask and helps students utilise study designs, data collection tools and analysis effectively.