1、 Introduction

The design of medical Chinese courses focuses on using real doctor-patient conversations as teaching materials to enhance students' professional communication skills. The course design draws on the research results of conversation analysis and emphasizes the importance of evaluating teaching effectiveness. The paper introduces the teaching needs, environment, objectives, textbooks, and teaching methods of the Medical Chinese course at Rice University, evaluates the learning effectiveness of students, and proposes improvement suggestions for course design.

2、 The Teaching Needs and Environment of Medical Chinese Course

The Rice University Medical Chinese Course admits 12-15 college students interested in the medical field every spring, with the aim of enhancing their clinical consultation skills in communicating with Chinese patients. The textbook "Chinese Listening and Speaking Course for Western Medicine" focuses on body parts and disease names as chapter themes, and evaluates students' ability to communicate during consultations through role-playing activities. However, the doctor-patient dialogue in the textbook lacks authenticity, so the course attempts to introduce real consultation dialogues and improve teaching methods by combining conversation analysis to enhance students' Chinese consultation communication skills.

3、 Conversation analysis: research on doctor-patient dialogue

As a discipline that studies human verbal communication, conversation analysis focuses on the conventions and details of conversations in natural communication, which has a significant impact on the design of second language courses. Research has shown that conversation analysis can improve students' daily communication skills. Research on doctor-patient dialogue shows that the dialogue consists of six stages: beginning, presenting the condition, collecting information, diagnosis, treatment, and ending. The language used in each stage is closely related to the characteristics of the participants and requires coordination and cooperation between both parties to complete the consultation.

4、 Six stages of consultation and learning objectives

The medical Chinese course at Rice University has designed a six stage consultation process, including: 1) at the beginning, doctors begin the consultation with open-ended questions; 2) State the condition, and the patient describes the condition; 3) Collecting information, doctors understand the condition through different types of questions; 4) Diagnosis, doctors make a diagnosis based on comprehensive information; 5) Treatment, the doctor proposes a treatment plan and obtains the patient's consent; 6) End, the doctor arranged for follow-up treatment and thanked the patient. The learning objectives of the course require students to play the roles of doctors and patients, master the consultation process, use contextually appropriate questions and answers, and communicate with patients during the treatment phase.

5、 Course Design

This article elaborates in detail on the sources, teaching applications, textbook selection, lesson plan design, as well as specific teaching steps and classroom activities of the inquiry corpus in the design of medical Chinese courses. The corpus is sourced from real doctor-patient conversations at a general practice clinic in Chinatown, Houston, USA. After screening through the framework of conversation analysis theory, seven dialogues were selected as the textbook. The textbook not only includes Chinese dialogues, but also combines English consultation dialogues to promote students' understanding of the differences in consultation discourse between Chinese and English. The lesson plan design revolves around six stages of inquiry dialogue, divided into five units, each focusing on different stages of learning. Teaching methods include using real conversations, analyzing doctor-patient interactions, and role-playing assessments. The learning objective of the third unit is to identify and use the interactive mode of the "information gathering" stage, and the textbook includes real consultation dialogues in both Chinese and English. The teaching steps include pre class tasks, dialogue comprehension, dialogue analysis, and oral practice, aiming to consolidate students' understanding of the doctor-patient interaction mode through practical activities.

6、 Teaching effectiveness evaluation

This chapter evaluates the effectiveness of medical Chinese language teaching based on real doctor-patient dialogue through role-playing activities. Three role-playing activities targeting common illnesses were designed, with students paired up to play the roles of doctors and patients respectively, using English prompt cards to alleviate the burden of understanding. The evaluation is divided into three stages, which are conducted at the beginning of the semester, after the teaching of the fifth unit text, and after the teaching of real dialogue. The evaluation criteria are based on six stages of doctor-patient dialogue, with a maximum score of 3 points for each stage. Scorers are trained to improve the quality of the scoring. The scoring results show that real dialogue teaching is more effective than textbook teaching in multiple stages, especially in the beginning and end stages. Real dialogue teaching helps students use appropriate expressions, while textbook teaching focuses more on the correct use of Chinese vocabulary and grammar. In role-playing, the doctor role has made greater progress than the patient role after textbook teaching, while in real dialogue teaching, the progress of the two roles is comparable.

7、 Conclusion

This study adopts the theory of conversation analysis and designs a medical Chinese course using real doctor-patient dialogues as teaching materials. The course is divided into six stages, aimed at improving students' understanding and application of the forms and sentences of doctor-patient interaction. The teaching evaluation shows that students have made significant progress in communication skills, especially in the diagnosis and treatment stages. The study pointed out that students have insufficient understanding of patients' mentality and suggested adopting a "patient-centered teaching method". Real conversations help medical students understand the physiological and psychological needs of patients. It is recommended to incorporate Chinese culture and traditional Chinese medicine consultation methods into the curriculum design to enhance students' communication skills with Chinese patients.