The Need for Focused Literacy Training in the Medical School Curriculum: A Cross-Sectional Study of Undergraduate Students

Table 1

Two-stage curricular intervention.

	Curricular intervention	Purpose	Content
Stage 1	Administration of the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI), a self-report instrument designed to assess adolescent and adult readers’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies while reading academic or school-related materials [10]	To determine the students’ self-perception of reading strategies in English for academic purposes; To raise the students’ awareness of reading strategies in English for academic purposes	32 questions related to; (i) Global Reading Strategies; (ii) Problem Solving Strategies; (iii) Support Reading Strategies; Plus; (i) Biodata: age and gender; (ii) Foreign language proficiency
Stage 2	Implementation of an adjunct workshop conducted cooperatively by a medical professor and an academic language consultant; Two interactive sessions integrated into the regularly scheduled course	To develop critical reading strategies in relation to domain specific argumentation: (i) Stylistic and rhetorical English language usage in empirical articles in scientific publications; (ii) Linguistic characteristics used to build an argument in empirical articles in scientific publications	Reading strategies; (i) Global Reading Strategies; (ii) Problem Solving Strategies; (iii) Support Reading Strategies; Genre analysis; (i) Rhetorical moves (IMRAD) [11–13]; (ii) Hedging and boosting devices [14]