Evaluative Analysis of a Medical Terminology Course Taught in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The study raised the issue of English language apparent weakness of the students of Medicine, Pharmacy and Applied Medical Sciences, which without any doubt affects pursuing their study, the participants were all enrolled in the above mentioned faculties of both universities King Saud and Almaarefa University. The researcher collected the data from the participants of the two mentioned universities, of both campuses male and female, in that the questionnaire was used, and the data collected were analyzed. The medical students in both universities, were the product of Arabic medium schools, they studied English language as in a traditional way, as in most of Arab countries public schools. In fact, in these government schools English language is sadly neglected. English is thought of as a tedious subject to pass at the end of each school semester, in the government public schools, English is usually taught by Saudi teachers, who themselves could not overcome the same difficulties, which their students currently suffer from. In the private schools, the situation is not as worse as in the government or public schools. English is taught in private schools in the first year of the primary stage, whereas, in public schools it started from the fourth year of the elementary stage. As a matter of fact, they only trained to answer grammatical exercises. Now, those students with all the language deformation, which has characterized them as the symptoms of a chronic disease characterized the patients, with the entire language defect and drawbacks, they carried with, joined medical colleges, and required to follow the English medium instructions, the medium that all the medical colleges claimed they have adopted. When they joined their medical colleges, to pursue the higher education, at that time they came to know how English was important. The difficulty became more complicated, when they were for the first time became aware that, their university core majors were all related to a language which they had never heard of before. In that they have to study biology, psychology, chemistry, physics, anatomy, communications and medical terminology in English, that in addition to the fact that these subjects are enriched with scientific language. Among all these subjects, the medical terminology is the only one that is taught in pure English, as it is difficult to find equivalent Arabic words or meaning. The crisis reached its peak when the newly-enrolled students, are required to read scientific and medical texts. It is obvious that the history of their past schooling was not taken into consideration. The medical terminology course, is the course that must be studied after completion of the general language course, the idea behind that, is to prepare the students well before embarking the medical English, as the course is based on the general language course, but the problem that they are facing, is that the general English course in its contents fails to provide any assistance, as the syllabus of the language course is shown in chapter 2 of this research. As the researcher mentioned before, the medical English is based and built on Latin and Greek terms, it is true that such new terms can easily be memorized and learned by the students, but the corresponding and equivalent meaning has to be written in English, therefore, the medical terms will remain Latin or Greek, unless are clarified and explained in standard English. However, the researcher stated the solution, it lies in the re-designing a new language course, which can facilitate the way to cope with the medical terminology course in particular and other related medical courses in general.