Multimodal Testing for Medical Students

How can textual complexity be tackled in the context of medical education and, in particular, its assessment? In answering this question, the article explores some important issues relevant to testing activities in text-based courses in English for medical students, where complexity refers to difficulties in evaluating the levels of competence when measured through entrance and exit tests. The article provides some precise descriptors that assess not so much improvements in grammar and language skills but rather those relating to learning styles, cross-cultural issues and most importantly the capacity to adapt to the progression in medical information that arises in the six-year degree medical course. The capacity to co-ordinate, recast and apply this information in new contexts is explored in relation to the definition of multimodal tests in English in the medical context; all this presupposes skillful handling on the part of both teacher and students of multimodal texts in the medical context, many of which relate to whole-part relationships in the human body.