Developing and piloting SemiMed—A resource for semi-technical medical vocabulary

Semi-technical medical vocabulary—words that often convey different meanings depending on context—commonly poses challenges for teaching and learning. These difficulties are largely due to polysemy and homography, which are not fully addressed in conventional dictionaries or frequency wordlists. This study aimed to develop and pilot a new lexical resource, named SemiMed, that explicitly accounts for polysemy and homography in semi-technical medical vocabulary. The starting point was Hsu’s (2013) corpus-based Medical Word List, which is useful for the teaching and learning of words with single but not multiple meanings. Multi-meaning semi-technical medical words in Hsu’s list were analyzed using a lexical semantic approach to polysemy and homography. A corpus-based analysis followed, to quantify word meaning frequency. Cantos and Sanchez’s (2001) Lexical Constellations were then adapted to showcase intricate interrelations between general and specialized meanings of semi-technical medical words. To examine SemiMed’s usefulness, a pilot study was conducted where 18 EFL medical students were provided with lexical resources, including SemiMed samples and conventional dictionaries, to help them use appropriate vocabulary while role-playing targeted medical scenarios. Focus groups were conducted to gain participants’ feedback on the usefulness of SemiMed.