Creating Fuzziness: Using video to engage and empower clinicians
Ros Wright
September 9, 2026
15:15 UK time
Accuracy is often eclipsed by fluency in clinical communications training, yet mastering advanced grammar concepts is essential to effective communication with colleagues and patients. This webinar focuses on hedging, used by healthcare professionals to describe side effects, give a prognosis, or deliver bad news. Despite its importance, hedging remains one of the most challenging aspects of grammar to teach.
In this webinar, Ros will present a set of materials to illustrate how video can bring grammar to life in high-stakes contexts. Participants will explore how a carefully chosen clip can be exploited for noticing tasks, discourse analysis, and follow-up practice, enabling learners to observe how clinicians shift between categorical and tentative language. The webinar offers a practical model for materials development, showing how video can raise awareness of both linguistic form and communicative purpose, while equipping learners with the subtle grammatical tools essential for effective, empathetic healthcare communication.
Bio
Ros Wright has over 20 yearsโ experience specializing in English for the healthcare sector. Aside from training clinicians for work in the NHS and preparing candidates for OET, for the last 2 years she has also been running How to Teach Clinical Communication Skills, a course to prepare trainers to work in the field of English for healthcare. Ros is the co-author of Good Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2008), winner of the inaugural BESIG Award for Innovation in ESP in 2008, and her most recent title is Step up to OET (Express Publishing, 2025), co-written with Tom Fassnidge. A former President of TESOL France and General Secretary of EALTHY, Ros was a Trustee of IATEFL 2017-2023.
Ros Wright has over 20 yearsโ experience specializing in English for the healthcare sector. Aside from training clinicians for work in the NHS and preparing candidates for OET, for the last 2 years she has also been running How to Teach Clinical Communication Skills, a course to prepare trainers to work in the field of English for healthcare. Ros is the co-author of Good Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2008), winner of the inaugural BESIG Award for Innovation in ESP in 2008, and her most recent title is Step up to OET (Express Publishing, 2025), co-written with Tom Fassnidge. A former President of TESOL France and General Secretary of EALTHY, Ros was a Trustee of IATEFL 2017-2023.