VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

NGUYỄN THỊ THU THUỶ
PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS IN TEACHING
AND LEARNING MEDICAL VOCABULARY
AT THANHHOA MEDICAL COLLEGE

(Thực trạng và giải pháp trong việc dạy và học
từ vựng chuyên ngành y tại trường
Cao Đẳng Y tế Thanh Hoá)
M.A. MINOR THESIS
Field: English Methodology
Code: 60 14 10
Course: K17
Supervisor: Kim Văn Tất Hanoi, 2010
2.1. The general review of the teaching and learning EMP at TMC……………
2.1.1. Teachers………………………………………………………………
2.1.2. Students…………………………………………………………………
2.1.3. Facilities………………………………………………………………
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4.3.1. Teaching vocabulary in context………………………………………
4.3.2. Making use of visual aids………………………………………………
4.3.2.1. Pictures……………………………………………………………….
4.3.2.2. Objects……………………………………………………………….
4.3.3. Teaching word parts…………………………………………………….
4.3.4. Consolidating vocabulary………………………………………………
PART C: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………
1. Summary of the study……………………………………………………
2. Limitations of the study…………………………………………………
3. Suggestions for further studies…………………………………………….
Reference
Appendix

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v
LIST OF FIGURES & TABLES
Table 1: Students’ length of English learning
Figure 1: Ways of learning vocabulary
Figure 2: Students’ management when they meet a new word
Figure 3: Problems influenced on students’ motivation and interest
Figure 4: Student’s problems when learning vocabulary
Table 2: Ways of presenting new words

fact, a good vocabulary size, because although it‘s possible to find examples in texts
(especially scientific or technical texts) where grammatical structure is crucial to
understanding the subtle nuances of meaning, what seems more important for
comprehension is knowing what the words mean. (Coady, 1993; Grabe and Stoller ,1997).
As Vermeer (1992: 147) puts it: ―Knowing words is the key to understanding and being
understood‖.
Vocabulary is like the base of a high building. Without it, nothing can be built. Teachers
who have been teaching English in general and English for Specific Purposes in particular
must know that at the beginning or in the end, vocabulary is always one of the biggest
problems. The English for Medical purposes (EMP) field is no exception. Medical
language is a special language. It is made up of vast pool of words and terms that is
employed by doctors and nurses in writing medical records and communicating with each
other. Questions are increasingly being asked about the role played by the specialized
vocabulary needed for academic study.
At ThanhHoa Medical College, teaching and learning medical vocabulary are a really
challenging job. Medical vocabulary has long been considered a difficult and boring
subject by many ESP students at the college. It takes much time and energy to make
progress in this field. For ESP teachers, correspondingly, it is difficult task to get students
involved in vocabulary explanation even they devoted much time to vocabulary teaching,
the results have been disappointing. The question posed for ESP teachers now is how to
meet the needs of learners of ESP, especially the needs of improving their vocabulary
acquisition for communication.
Facing this situation, the teachers of English of ThanhHoa Medical College want to do
something new to help students develop vocabulary acquisition. Being one of the teachers
there, I would like to do a study to find out an effective way to claim a more satisfactory
standing for medical vocabulary for the second-year students at ThanhHoa Medical
College, as a result, the minor thesis title goes as: 2

objectives. To begin with, an extensive review of literature was conducted, critically
examining vocabulary‘s role in ESP teaching and learning.
Various sources of data were used, involving second-year students and teachers of ESP at
ThanhHoa Medical College in order to achieve the aims of the study: 3
 Conducting a survey questionnaire to investigate students‘ evaluative comments
on and attitudes towards teaching and learning medical vocabulary at Thanhhoa
Medical College.
 Interviewing ESP teachers to get better insight into the research questions.
6. Design of the study
The thesis consists of three main parts. The first part introduces the rationale for the study
carried out by the researcher, the aims of the study, the research questions, the scope of the
study, and the method by which the study was conducted. The second part developed in
four chapters. The first chapter reviews relevant literature concerning the general
knowledge of English for Medical Purposes and the vocabulary teaching and learning. The
second chapter discusses the context and methodology of the study. The results and
discussion of the survey are presented in the third chapter, followed by the solutions in the
fourth, which are expected to improve the second year students‘ medical vocabulary
learning and the teachers‘ medical vocabulary teaching in TMC context. The conclusion
serves as a summary of the major issues involved and discusses the implications of the
study, limitations of the study and suggestion for further research.


perceived gap in the English language and study of learners who have passed through
traditional language classes, and those required for study purposes within universities. He
agues that subject content-based courses can impart both subject knowledge and language
competence at the same time. What he identified was actually what ESP is concerned with.
According to Perren (1974), an ESP course is purposeful and aims at the successful
performance of occupational or educational roles. It is based on a rigorous analysis of
students‘ needs and should be ―tailor-made.‖ Any ESP course may differ from another in
its selection of skills, topics, situations and functions, and also language. It is likely to be
limited duration. Students are more often adults but not necessarily so, and may be at any
level of competence in the language: beginner, post-beginner, intermediate, ect…Student,
may take part in their ESP course before embarking on their occupational or educational
role, or they may combine their study of English with performance of their role in English
as well as in their first language. According to this definition, EMP is a kind of ESP. 5
We notice that attention to learners‘ needs is a key element in any definitions of ESP.
Therefore, EMP is intended to help the medical student who is planning to study medicine
in English. It is assumed that he will have some knowledge of general English but limited
experience of studying works in medical English.
1.1.2. Medical English
English for Medical Purposes (EMP) is one of the genres in English for Specific
Purposes (ESP). Class subjects in ESP have been getting widespread among
Vietnamese university. ESP has been trying to attain its popularity since the 1990s
among Vietnamese university in the growing necessities in ESP genres such as English
for economics, business, English for law, and English for Science and Technology
(EST). However, class subjects in EMP are still small in number in Vietnam
compared to other ESP genres despite the strong need of EMP.
Medical language is a special language. It is made up of vast pool of words and terms that
is employed by doctors and nurses in writing medical records and communicating with

2009).
There are varied answers, and we cannot choose only one as its best answer. At the
one end of the spectrum is the view that no specialist knowledge is required or
desirable. EMP teaching roles, materials and techniques are not significantly different
from EGP. Moreover, EMP teachers should not put themselves in the false position of
seeming to teach medical subjects.
At the other end is the view that EMP teachers should have at least a lay knowledge of
medicine and an interest in the way in which doctors and nurses work or study; and that
they should ideally know as much as possible about the register of medical English.
For example, these are typical ‗genres‘ or text types, typical collocations and their use,
and the pronunciation of basic medical terminology etc.
Then to what extent do we take into account in our teaching the specialist knowledge
the learner brings to the EMP classroom? In most EMP classrooms, the medical
knowledge of the learners is the most important resource in the EMP classroom. In
order to best exploit this resource, EMP teachers need some understanding of basic
medical concepts and work patterns in medicine.
1.2. Vocabulary teaching and learning
1.2.1. Vocabulary and Its role in language teaching and learning
Words are the building blocks in a language. By learning the lexical items, we start to
develop knowledge of the target language. Based on our experience of being a language
learner, we seem to have no hesitation in recognizing the importance of vocabulary in L2
learning. Meare (1980) points out that language learners admit that they encounter
considerable difficulty with vocabulary even when the upgrade from an initial stage of
acquiring a second language to a much more advanced level. Language practitioners also
have reached a high degree of consensus regarding the important of vocabulary. The
findings in Macaro‘s survey (2003) indicate that secondary language teachers view
vocabulary as a topic they most need research to shed light on to enhance the teaching and 7

types (Thornbury 94-99): 8
1) Identifying – means finding words in a text or listening, e.g. underline specific
words or expressions in the text, or tick, put in the correct column or list items that
you hear.
2) Selecting – means recognizing words and making choices among them, e.g. circle
the odd word in the line.
3) Matching – includes recognizing words and than pairing them with their
synonym, antonym, definition, pictures to words etc. It can be intended to matching
parts of lexical items to create collocations (there is a very popular memory game
based on matching called Pelmanism).
4) Sorting – putting the lexical items into different categories, e.g. put these
adjectives in two groups – positive and negative.
5) Ranking and sequencing – putting the lexical items in some kind of order, e.g.
ordering items chronologically, ranking items according to personal preference etc.
Productive practice (the productive skills – writing or speaking – are incorporated in the
vocabulary teaching,) includes these types (Thornbury 100): completion and creation.
- Completion tasks (context is given), often called gap-fills, are widely used not only in
practice but also in revision stages. They include open gap-fills or closed gap-fills
(multiple choice activities), crosswords,
- Creation tasks: the learner use the word in a sentence or a story, in writing, speaking or
both forms, use affixes to build new naming units from given words.
Generally speaking, vocabulary practice is divided into controlled and free. Controlled
practice has to come first, because controlled activities require the student to produce a
certain structure, they practice accuracy and fix the pattern. The second phase, which
demands productive use of vocabulary, is free practice. The specialists point out the
usage of free practice in the class, because according to Lewis (151-152) ―to know a word
means how to use it in the real life to be able to communicate.‖ This is a typical example

of vocabulary into an active form. Research into memory suggests that, in order to ensure
that information moves into permanent long-term memory, a number of principles must to
be followed. One of them is use. ―Putting words to use, preferably in some interesting way,
is the best way of ensuring they are added to long-term memory. It is the principle well-
known as Use it or lose it (Thornbury 24). For this reason, words must be presented in
their usual contexts, so that learners can get a sense for their meaning, their register and
collocations. In separated vocabulary activities, words are often presented in the form of
lexical sets. It is highly recognized that it is easier to learn the words that are thematically
arranged but have looser relation than lexical sets. The system of practical exercises should
be thoroughly organized so that the amount of new words does not discourage the student.
1.2.5. EMP vocabulary practice and consolidation
The students should be encouraged to think about the importance of the word, therefore the
examples in context are highly useful. Moreover, this approach must be focused 10
predominantly on learners, each unit has to have clear aims, motivating topics and
challenging practical activities. The appropriate issues must be presented in the context of
the real life, in this case, of the present vocational school, where ―young people are given
numerous opportunities to follow purposeful learning‖ (Buchanan 6). As Maehr points out,
in this way, teachers can support the naturalness of learning vocabulary, and in such an
enriched atmosphere, learners find ideal authentic reasons for learning a foreign language.
ESP vocabulary can be presented, practiced and consolidated by similar methods and
techniques used for practicing and consolidation of general vocabulary. Writing tasks can
include reports and different instructions for medicine, making summaries from technical
journals, describing processes and techniques, labeling diagrams and pictures, describing
graphs and comments on charts etc.
1.2.6. Difficulties in teaching and learning vocabulary
Outside the classroom our students (and they are probably typical) do not engage in
extensive reading. It‘s very unlikely; in fact, they will do any reading at all: one reason is a

the word‘s pronunciation (or rather its pronounceability), its orthography, the degree of
correspondence between how the word is written and how it is said (i.e. script and sound).
A new word in English may offer no clues to its pronunciation or, perhaps worse,
misleading clues (compare, for example, crow and cow; thrown and down; but then
crown). Other intralexical factors include: word length, number of syllables, morphology,
part of speech and semantic features such as abstractness, appropriateness, idiomaticity,
multiple meanings. The latter are a particulary rich area for confusion. Many learners fix
on one meaning they know and find it very difficult to use another – even if the one they
know has no sense in that new context.
Other factors affecting learnability may involve the target word‘s relationships to other
words (interlexical factors‘) and crosslinguistic influences or transfer from the learner‘s
L1. To give an example of the first, there could be dangers in teaching associated words,
such as synonyms or opposites, at the same time. For example, teaching ‗right‘ and ‗left‘
together could result in students confusing form and meaning and being unsure afterwards
whether left means ‗left‘ or whether it means ‗right‘. A similar confusion occurs with
words that share a number of semantic features (cf. Higa 1963; Nation and Newton 1997);
for example. rigid, stiff, unbending, inflexible, stubborn.
A quite important contributor to difficulty is what Laufer (1991) termed ‗synformy‘. This
is the visual or acoustic similarity of lexical forms which may cause learners to confuse
similar words. We will return to some of these points later with examples, but first we‘d
like to move on to the question of what it means to know a word.
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CHAPTER 2: CONTEXT OF THE STUDY
2.1. The general review of teaching and learning EMP at TMC

activities that motivate students‘ attention and listening improvement. 13
It was observed by the researcher that some of the ESP teacher at TMC used techniques of
presenting new vocabulary in the following ways:
 Asking students to read new words after them, and then explain the words in their
Vietnamese one by one.
 Or asking students to copy words for many times without teaching how to use the
words in the real communicative situations.
 Or dealing with all words equally.
As mentioned above, the context of TMC reveals a situation whereby students are required
to learn English, but the English they have learned in traditional language classes may not
be used effectively in real life. It is apparent that student-centered approach has not been
widely used in teaching English at TMC. The teachers still take the key role in classroom
activities and corner the students to be active learners. Therefore, we should apply more
appropriate teaching techniques to improve the situation of teaching vocabulary at TMC.
2.1.2. Students
My students are non-English majors coming from different parts of the country. All have
developed English language skills during the first years of college study under formal
instruction. In the second year, students are expected to learn English for Medical purposes
and prepare for weekly tests and final examination essentially by themselves.
During the teaching, I heard from time to time students complain in puzzlement: ―I„ve
studied English for more than ten years but I don‟t seem to have noticeable progress in
English. I can only use more or less than the same words as I used before in speaking and
writing.‖, ― I know all the reading skills and grammar but still I can‟t understand the
exact meaning of this passage.‖ ―I recite fifteen words a day. It does help in reading
comprehension. But I always forget words I recited a week ago.‖ ―How can I remember
words and their meanings quickly and for a long time?", "How can I use words properly in
different contexts?", "Can you tell me an easy and simple way to retain the vocabulary that

but it avoids one of the central features of vocabulary use, namely that words occur in
context.
In the syllabus, words are listed alphabetically with the correspondent Vietnamese
meaning. Students are required to master all these words that teachers teach them. The
main purpose of learning words in the syllabus is to pass the examination. Many words
recited appear only in the examination after which they will not be used again by students.
Therefore, many words are only stored in students‘ short-term memory as passive; words
and will never become active ones. The kind of vocabulary learning does not have much
long-term effect.
When being asked about the way of learning English vocabulary, most second-year
students in our classes said they just copied new words provided by teachers or looked up
words in the dictionary. Many of them marked or underlined words they did not know in
their textbooks and noted the meaning in Vietnamese. Some students noted the time they
had to copy lines and lines of new words in their notebooks which were forgotten soon. "It 15
was so boring. I hated learning new words that way!" Sometimes, students asked many
questions regarding learning vocabulary like "Teacher, how can I remember words and
their meanings quickly and for a long time?", "How can I use words properly in different
contexts?", "Can you tell me an easy and simple way to retain the vocabulary that I have
learnt?" etc. All of the learners expressed their wish to learn vocabulary effectively in more
interesting ways than the traditional ways that they knew.
2.1.3. Facilities
Large classes usually present special challenges in terms of EMP vocabulary teaching and
learning.
Ever since 2006, TMC‘s higher education has undergone a continuous expansion of
enrollment at a rate of about 35% every year, which has given rise to a noticeable shortage
of both English teachers and classrooms. Due to the very limited educational recourses,
teaching English to large classes is a common phenomenon in TMC. In TMC, non-English

classes, who take English for Medical Purposes class related for their own field.
Students‘ age ranged from 18 to 21 years with an average age 18. The number of female
students was higher than that of male. The students in of Nursing Faculty get an ESP
course for 1 semester (75 hours), 10 meetings, and twice a week.
Besides the medical college students, the respondents of the study were 3 English
lecturers who are experts in teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and teaching
those classes.
2.2.2. Research Instruments
Questionnaire and interview are mainly instruments to collect the data:
 The questionnaire was designed for students because it is a good way to access
the learner‘s point of view (Brace 2004:7). It is convenient and easy to conduct.
It contains of 10 items pertaining a) student‘s attitude toward vocabulary
learning and teaching, b) vocabulary learning strategies while studying their
academic texts, c) problems encountering in learning vocabulary. The
instrument required 15 minutes to complete and was administered in the
students‘ ESP class.
 The interview for teachers was intended to collect almost the same information
as the questionnaire. In other word, administration of theses type of interview
would enable the respondent to give their objective opinion about problems that
their students and they encounter in teaching and learning medical vocabulary.
Because only three teachers (including the teacher-researcher) are responsible
for teaching ESP course at TMC so it was just interviewed with two ESP
teachers. Despite that, useful comments were received and take into
consideration. The interview was conducted in the form of computer-accessed
personal interviewing. It is an interviewing technique that the interviewer and
the respondents sit in front of computer and communicative through chatting 17
software. Then interview of 8-10 minutes were conducted in English with those

18
CHAPTER THREE: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
3.1. Results
3.1.1. Questionnaire for students
Question 1: How long have you been learning English?

Length of English learning
Total
O years
14.2%
3-6 years
35.7%
6-10 years
42.8 %
More than 10 years
10.3 %

Table 1: Students’ length of English learning
Most ESP classes, as from the table, can be defined as heterogeneous, formed by students
with mixed capacities in English. The Table 1 demonstrated that 14.2 % of the students
didn‘t study English. While 35.7% of the students studied English for 3-6 years and 42.8 %
of the students studied English for 6-10 years. There were 14.3% of students who studied
English for ten years. This means that it is very urgent for the students who didn‘t study
English to enlarge vocabulary and master a certain number of English words as quickly as
possible so as to catch up with the others. As for teachers, who have been teaching for two
years have always faced additional difficulties including in vocabulary teaching, mainly
based on the number of students without previous considerable experience in English.
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Vietnamese equivalents covering 100% and next is oral/written repetition (85%). The word
list was also widely used approach to vocabulary development (66%), followed by item
‗made sentence with new words‘ (22%). However, students seemed to have problems in
connecting new words to other words they knew with similar or opposite meanings (85%)
and students also encountered difficulties in analyzing words by breaking them into parts
(90%). In term of reviewing strategy, the figure indicates that fewer students knew the
importance of revision and reviewed the newly learned words actively, only 9 % of the
students reviewed new words often. The least preferred strategy are item ‗connected word
with pictures‘ (5%) This may be significant because the studies showed that higher
students tended to use memory strategies and cognitive strategies. Even they recognized
the value of the rest strategies, their action did not reflect their beliefs. All of the learners
expressed their wish to learn vocabulary effectively in more interesting ways than the
traditional ways that they knew. With regards to vocabulary learning strategies instruction,
therefore it might be anticipated that students should receptive to a program that included
those strategies.
Question 3: What do you often do when you meet a new word?
20%
10%
68%
32%
30%
5%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%

of words then they wrote those words in their notebooks or complete exercises. Many
students did not think learning vocabulary in context was very useful, may be because their
poor background knowledge couldn‘t contribute much to guessing word meaning.
Working those ways, after a short period of time, many learners may find out that learning
vocabulary didn‘t satisfy them, and they thought the cause for it was just their bad
memorization.
Question 4: Which problems have influenced your motivation and interest in leaning
vocabulary at class?
85%
18%
30%
98%
20%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
Requirements of the examinations
Teachers' teaching methods and
techniques
Students' low background
knowledge
Time-management (lack of time
for further practice)
Big size-class and poor facilities
Figure 3: Problems influenced on students’ motivation and interest
From the above chart, we found that things turned out to be encouraging and our efforts
did bring about some results.