Rhetorical structure and linguistic features of case presentations in case reports in Taiwanese and international medical journals

The case presentation is the core section of a medical case report. Issues in the teaching of case report writing have recently been the subject of great interest in medical education, especially in the era of globalization. Given that Taiwanese medical students, residents and junior physicians are requested to write case reports in English and they may experience difficulty in language use, there is a need to investigate models. The purpose of this study is to identify the rhetorical structure of case presentations and to find the differences in the linguistic features of case presentations between international and Taiwanese medical journals. We conducted a hand-tagged move analysis of a corpus of 40 case presentations. The findings revealed that the rhetorical structure of case presentations is similar. However, differences emerged in the analysis of the linguistic features showing chronological order and the record of admission and these were perceived as the two major drawbacks in Taiwanese presentations. For medical and English teachers, these findings can be easily transformed into teaching materials. This study contributes to a model of interdisciplinary collaboration among professionals in English for Medical Purposes (EMP) and Medicine on college teaching and training of medical English writing.