Teaching Medical Students to Speak Humanese

Charles Hall, Al-Faisal University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

In ESP classrooms, we often ask students, whether engineers, doctors, or air traffic controllers, to “know their audience.” But what happens when the audience is not a peer, a professor, or a fellow clinician, but a disgruntled taxi driver, an illiterate grandmother, or a surly teenager? Suddenly, after years of learning the intricacies of their profession, the moves of their professional genres, and the specialized vocabulary, collocations, and terms of art that ensure smooth and rapid communication among professionals, we suddenly ask them to discard those hard-won skills and “deprofessionalize” their communication.

In our “ESP for Medicine” course for 2^nd year, undergraduate medical students at Al-Faisal University in Saudi Arabia, this question becomes the final challenge: Can you explain a public health issue in three minutes, using no more than seven slides, and no jargon to a specific, non-professional audience?

This assignment, our final project, asks students to unlearn the language of medicine and relearn the language of people. It is deceptively simple: choose an appropriate public health topic, design a PowerPoint, and deliver an enthusiastic talk using the Hamburger Model (Look at this! Here's what I'm going to tell you. I'm telling you. This is what I told you.). But for students trained to speak in acronyms and Latin-rooted terminology, the task is anything but easy, and for those trained to believe that more information is never enough, the requirement to deliver (at a normal speed) just enough information to help the audience is intimidating at first.

From an ESP perspective, this task is a genre shift. Students move from technical discourse to public-facing communication, adapting register, tone, and structure. It is also a form of needs-based instruction: they must consider not only what they themselves know, but what their audience needs to understand and what we can assume the audience knows already, which in some cases, is almost nothing. The assignment foregrounds clarity, empathy, and rhetorical awareness: core goals in English for medical purposes. Hu & Chen (2022) found that emotional engagement and rhetorical scaffolding significantly improved writing outcomes among medical undergraduates. Their study highlights how genre awareness and affective feedback can help students move beyond technical correctness toward audience-centered communication. In our classroom, similar patterns emerge: students report greater confidence and clarity when they rehearse with peers, receive targeted feedback, and reflect on their rhetorical choices.

Each presentation is strictly capped at three minutes and must follow strict design constraints: no more than seven slides, with seven lines per slide and seven words per line. These limits are not arbitrary; they are andragogical. In ESP, especially in public health contexts, clarity and conciseness are paramount. Maximums rather than minimums force students to prioritize meaning, eliminate clutter, and foreground audience needs. They learn to distill complex ideas into digestible visuals, avoiding the trap of overloading slides with data or jargon. One student created a slide showing a single pill next to a shield, explaining how antibiotics “protect us, but only if we use them wisely.” Another used a cartoon sun and a sweating pilgrim to illustrate heat stroke prevention during Hajj. These visuals were simple, but the messages struck home.

But the real transformation happens when students begin to think not just about what they are saying, but how they are being perceived. Afterall, they are often only 19 or 20 years old and just beginning their medical career. This is where we introduce the acronym PAY: Purpose, Audience, and You.

PAY is a simple framework, but it opens up complex conversations. What is your purpose in this talk? Who is your audience, and what do they know, fear, or misunderstand? And finally, who are you at this moment? What do you bring to the room, and how will people read you and likely judge you?

Table 1: PAY Framework

This framework aligns with grounded theory principles: students reflect on their communicative identity, audience assumptions, and rhetorical goals. These reflections emerge organically through peer feedback, rehearsal, and classroom dialogue.

For many of our students, but especially the young Muslim women who may wear a hijab (head scarf) or even a niqab (face mask), this last question is the hardest. In a society where public speaking is still primarily a gendered act (although this is changing), stepping forward with confidence can feel risky. Some students worry about being “too assertive.” Others fear being dismissed or talked over.

To help with those insecurities, we emphasize the importance of the primacy effect: how people form impressions in the first few seconds. We discuss tone, posture, eye contact. We practice introductions that are clear, warm, and purposeful. And we talk about the recency effect—how the final moments of a presentation linger in the listener’s mind. “Start strong,” we tell them, “but end stronger.”

Zerbini et al. (2025) found that targeted non-verbal feedback helped female medical students close confidence gaps in clinical communication. While our classroom data is qualitative, thematic patterns suggest similar outcomes: students report increased self-awareness and rhetorical agency after repeated rehearsal and feedback.

We also spend time dismantling (and forbidding) the default opening: “Hi, my name is…” followed by “Today I will talk about…” While polite, this formula wastes precious seconds and dilutes impact. Instead, we ask students to begin with a hook or in the Hamburger Model, “sesame seeds,” something vivid, unexpected, or emotionally resonant. Not a summary, not a title, but a moment that grabs attention and earns curiosity.

This is harder than it sounds. It requires risk. Vulnerability. Imagination. But when students find the right opening, the transformation is immediate.

One student began her talk on Vitamin D deficiency with a good rhetorical question: “Do you know where you get vitamin D? Yes, that's right from the sun. So, why under the sunniest sky in the world, are 60% of Saudi women Vitamin D deficient.” Another opened a presentation on antibiotic resistance with: “Imagine a world where a paper cut could kill you.” These lines did not just inform; they provoked. They created tension. They made the audience lean in.

We call this the “out-of-the-blue” hook. It is not random, it is strategic. It sets tone, stakes, and mood. And when paired with PAY, it becomes a powerful tool for self-awareness. Students begin to ask: What do I want my audience to feel? What assumptions/presuppositions do they bring? What impression do I make in the first few precious seconds?

We also require students to choose topics that matter to them personally depending on their backgrounds, even if those topics are not locally relevant to Riyadh’s dry desert climate. Our student body includes learners from many countries, and we have found that allowing them to speak from their own environmental and cultural contexts deepens engagement and authenticity.

One Bangladeshi student spoke about arsenic contamination in groundwater, a crisis affecting millions in rural South Asia. A student from Pakistan addressed the rise of dengue fever in urban Lahore, linking it to stagnant water and poor sanitation. An Indian student explored the health effects of air pollution during Diwali. One student from Sudan chose malaria, almost non-existent in Riyadh, as his presentation topic, not just because it is a public health concern, but because it is personal. He began his talk with quiet conviction: “I had malaria when I was six. I remember the fevers, the weakness, the way my mother stayed up all night, and I remember drinking cups and cups of the herbal medicine my grandmother made for me.”

CDC guidance supports culturally specific case selection as a strategy for improving public health literacy (CDC, 2024). In our classroom, this approach fosters ownership, empathy, and rhetorical precision.

For the women students, this lesson is especially powerful. In a field where authority is often coded male, and young female medical students are often mislabeled as nurses, learning to speak with confidence is an act of resistance. We watch them rehearse, revise, and rise. We watch them claim the mic, not just to inform, but to inspire. And we remind them: the way you speak shapes the way you are heard. The way you are heard shapes the way you are remembered.

Although this assignment was designed within the Saudi, English-medium, medical context, its andragogical core is widely applicable. The challenge of translating specialized knowledge into accessible language is central to all ESP instruction, whether in engineering, law, business, or hospitality. This basic truth echoes something Albert Einstein is thought to have said: “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”

The structure, brief, audience-aware, purpose-driven communication, can be adapted to any discipline where learners must speak across boundaries of expertise. Everyone can learn to speak Humanese.

References

Bhatia, V. K. (2004). Worlds of written discourse: A genre-based view. London: Continuum.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Plain language materials and resources. https://www.cdc.gov/health-literacy/php/develop-materials/plain-language.html

Hu, N., & Chen, M. (2022). Improving ESP writing class learning outcomes among medical university undergraduates: How do emotions impact? Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 909590. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.909590

Stanford Center for Health Education. (2024). Health communication: Strategies for impact and success. https://online.stanford.edu/courses/som-xche0019-health-communication-strategies-impact-and-success

Zerbini, G., Schneider, P., Reicherts, M. et al. A novel multi-measure approach to study medical students’ communication performance and predictors of their communication quality - a cross-sectional study. BMC Med Educ 25, 685 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-025-07018-9

Charles Hall retired 12 years ago from U. of Memphis to join the English Department at Alfaisal University. His work intertwines three areas of interest: intercultural communication, ESP [medicine and law], and teacher training. He has worked in over 51 countries, including Timor-Leste, South Sudan, Yemen, and Venezuela.