International physicians in the United States now total more than 25 per cent of the physician workforce. This title offers a program for an English language curriculum that is specifically designed for the important and growing group of international medical professionals, with a focus on both instruction and assessment.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Professional Communication provides a broad coverage of the key areas where language and professional communication intersect and gives a comprehensive account of the field. The four main sections of the Handbook cover: Approaches to Professional Communication Practice Acquisition of Professional Competence Views from the Professions This invaluable reference book incorporates not only an historical view of the field, but also looks to possible future developments. Contributions from international scholars and practitioners, focusing on specific issues, explore the major approaches to professional communication and bring into focus recent research. This is the first handbook of language and professional communication to account for both pedagogic and practitioner perspectives and as such is an essential reference for postgraduate students and those researching and working in the areas of applied linguistics and professional communication.

"Medical Professionals and Their Work" conveys how medical people shape and organize the knowledge, perception, and experience of illness, as well as the substance of illness behavior, its management, and treatment. It is now well established that the unique symbolic equipment of the human animal is intimately connected with the functioning of the body. Freidson and Lorber believe that the proper understanding of specifically human rather than generally "animal" illness requires careful and systematic study of the social meanings surrounding illness.The content of social meanings varies from culture to culture and from one historical period to another. As important as the content of those social meanings, is the organization of groups who serve as carriers and, sometimes, creators. In the case of illness, a critical difference exists between those considered to be competent to diagnose and treat the sick and those excluded from this special privilege - a separation as old as the shaman or medicine-man. Such differences become solidified when the expert healer becomes a member of an organized, full-time occupation, sustained in monopoly over the work of diagnosis and treatment by the force of the state, and invested with the authority to make official designation of the social meanings to be ascribed to physical states.The medical profession in advanced nations is in a vise between professional needs and political demands. Its organization and its knowledge establish many of the conditions for being recognizably and legitimately ill, and the professional controls many of the circumstances of treatment. It thus plays a central role in shaping the experience of being ill. With this fact of modern life in mind, this collection on the character of experts or professionals in general and of medicine as a profession in particular is uniquely fashioned.