Learning English vocabulary for medical purposes : a mixed-methods study of Chinese medical students’ strategies and needs

Abstract

 With English serving as the lingua franca in the medical field, many East Asian universities have provided English for Medical Purposes (EMP) courses. However, problems encountered in medical terminology acquisition have yet to be fully addressed due to less attention devoted to specified vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) and needs. This mixed-method study investigated medical vocabulary learning beliefs, strategies, and needs specific to medical students at a Chinese-medium university. With an explanatory sequential design, questionnaires based on Gu’s (2018) VLS taxonomy were distributed to 130 EMP students, followed by semi-structured interviews with 6 Clinical Medicine majors. In line with previous studies, the current research findings revealed that Chinese medical students preferred contextual learning rather than rote memorization and adopted various strategies when learning medical terminology, with a significant preference for combining guessing and dictionary strategies. However, significant gender differences were only found in metacognitive and cognitive categories. While male medical students were more proficient in recognizing important medical vocabulary, their female counterparts noted those useful medical words and used their background knowledge to guess the meaning more frequently. As for the relationship between VLS and their EMP scores, higher-achieving students were still active learners outside the classroom and employed activation strategies more frequently. In addition, medical students showed the particular need to incidentally acquire medical terms through extensive reading and learn more about medical VLS. The pedagogical implications were presented, focusing on improving medical vocabulary learning efficiency according to their specialized vocabulary learning needs.