A Corpus-Based Evaluation of English Programs for Medical Education in Iran

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has grown in importance in these years. English for Medical Purposes (EMP) as one of its types plays a vital role for medical students. This study was conducted to evaluate the textbooks taught in teaching English in different programs of medical universities. The study focused on six textbooks widely used in medical universities. The method for the analysis was corpus linguistics. The researchers of the study compiled the English for Medical Programs corpus (EMP) as well as a corpus from the videos of YouTube with medical content. They examined the corpus of the textbook against YouTube corpus as well as an already available corpus known as Medical Web Corpus. Sketch Engine was used for the analysis. According to the findings, three corpora were compatible. The further qualitative information indicated that the words that were typical of medical web and YouTube corpora and didn’t exist in EMP corpus are already known by medical students. Findings also indicated that the focus needs to be on general English, as students need this vocabulary for communicating with the international community.