This thesis is devoted to evaluating the authenticity of "doctor-patient interview" on the existing Korean textbooks in terms of discourse structure and presenting more realistic dialogues.
The method of "Conversation analysis" is applied to the r...
This thesis is devoted to evaluating the authenticity of "doctor-patient interview" on the existing Korean textbooks in terms of discourse structure and presenting more realistic dialogues.
The method of "Conversation analysis" is applied to the recordings and transcriptions of doctor-patient interviews conducted by Korean speakers in real life. The analysing drew communication principles in particular situations and those principles form the basis of the standards for the authenticity evaluation.
This thesis takes a close look at the functional phases and each functional's sequence of both real-life doctor-patient interviews and the dialogues on the Korean textbooks. By doing this, it shows how the dialogues on the Korean textbooks are different from the real-life communication.
Real-life doctor-patient interviews are found to have these aspects.
First, real-life doctor-patient interviews usually go through repetitions of inquiry and specification phases. The dialogues on the Korean books typically have "four functional phases": introducing, inquiring, informing and prescription. In real life, however, the interview often goes back from specification to inquiry, repeating the process from inquiring to informing. It depends mostly on whether the interview is first or not.
Second, the essential conversational move in the introducing phase appears to be "doctor's introductory questions and patient's answers". The introductory questions are open-ended while doctors use closed questions in the inquiring phase.
Third, the essential conversational move in the inquiring phase appears to be "doctor's inquiries and patient's answers". This essential move takes place more than twice in most cases unless a doctor has enough information.
Fourth, certain essential conversational moves in each phase sometimes do not take place and the interview does not proceed according to the sequence.
Fifth, doctors use two different ways to inform patients of their health state: explaining the current state and simply mentioning diseases. In most cases, doctors provide patients with explanations. It seems that doctors read patient's desire to get a clear picture of their state.
Sixth, the prescription phase is much more complicated than the previous phases. It is because patients engage in the conversation more actively. Various conversational moves take place depending on patient's responses to a doctor's explanation of how to solve a problem or improve a situation.
This thesis suggests that these findings need to applied to making dialogues on Korean textbooks in order to increase the authenticity. For this, it is also necessary to clearly notify situational contexts.
According to the result of the analysis and the suggestion, this thesis present actual examples. Each section of the examples shows partly revised dialogues stage by stage and presents the completely revised one. All examples do not leave out any phase, but it is stressed that an instructor needs to point out where can be left out in a real-life doctor-patient interview.