In a university setting, information-gathering about content courses is essential if English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practitioners are to understand and fully appreciate the communication needs and difficulties of their students. Most importantly, this knowledge can lead to the design and delivery of more appropriate and meaningful academic language courses for non-native speakers The end result is an improvement in the quality of both teaching and learning.
This paper focuses on one phase of a three-year ethnographic study that I have been carrying out at The Chinese University of Hong Kong with the support of an Earmarked Grant (University Grants Commission of Hong Kong). Specifically I have been investigating the use of the case method in business administration classes in order to gain a better understanding of the linguistic and cultural difficulties involved with English-medium, case-based learning in this bilingual (Chinese-English) context, This data has provided direction for the design and implementation of an ESP business communications course at CUHK.

This paper reports an action research project which aims to develop an English enhancement course for medical students undergoing clinical training at the University of Hong Kong, We videotaped six one-hour sessions of ward teaching and identified linguistic skills that students need in order to activate their medical learning. These skills were found to include the ability to use appropriate colloquial and technical terms in questioning and reporting case histories, to recite the chronology of a medical history, to report the results of physical examinations, and to describe the location and pathology of internal organs accurately. Based on the data analysis, we developed teaching materials which aim to raise students' awareness of the cognitive and linguistic demands of the clinical training program, and to improve their performance through various communicative tasks and through the role-play of parallel cases.