The purpose of this edited volume is to present current research that lies at the intersection of healthcare communication, global migration, and the rapidly expanding technologies used for language testing. The global COVID-19 pandemic accelerated at a dizzying pace tectonic shifts already well under way: English as the language of international healthcare collaboration; the trans-global flow of healthcare professionals across international borders; the scramble to remote and online delivery of healthcare education and skills assessment; and the largely unquestioned application of artificial intelligence technologies such as neural networks and deep learning to assessing language proficiency in general, and medical language in particular. Fueled by the uncertainty of a pandemic, these rapid developments, with far-reaching implications, have taken place largely unchallenged. With large-scale vaccination promising the beginning of the end to the upheaval wrought by COVID-19, contributors to this volume take a reflective and critical stance on the intersection of healthcare communication and technology for testing of medical language proficiency.
The series Trends in Applied Linguistics meets the challenges of the rapidly growing field of applied linguistics. In a very broad sense, applied linguistics is understoodby focusing on the application of theoretical linguistics to current problems arising in different contexts of human society. Given the interdisciplinary character of applied linguistics, the series includes cognitive, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and educational perspectives.
The following topicsare included in the series:
- Second language acquisition and the acquisition of additional languages
- Bilingual and multilingual education
- Language planning and language policy
- Literacy skills
- Second/foreign language pedagogy
- Translation and interpretation
- Language for specific purposes
- Discourse analysis
- Language testing and assessment
- Child language
- Language and gender
- Pragmatics and rhetorics
- Corpus analysis
- Critical pedagogies
- Research methodology in applied linguistics
- Language and technology
