Although management students have training courses in clinical settings but they
are not concerned with medical terminology. They have already learned some
standards in their specialized courses and then they examine to what extent these
standards are taken into account in each ward of the hospital or clinics.
Medical records students were at post diploma level. They have the course medical
terminology together with their ESP. They need to give codes to the name of the
diseases, the organ or part of the body in which the illness occurred and the cause of
the disease. Therefore, it is necessary to know their English terms to give codes to
them properly. Their content teachers use very few English terms in their speech and
the students are not necessarily required to use them either. In their training courses,
they read the patients’ medical records and give codes to the name of the diseases, the
organ or part of the body in which the illness occurred and the cause of the disease.
Students of health care services management mainly (98% of cases) used repetition
and memorization strategies which they believed to be more helpful for their short
term purposes (i.e., passing the ESP exam). They believed that most of their
references were translated into Persian and since they had Persian equivalents for
specialized words, it was not necessary to learn the English terms for long term
purposes.
In sum, students in different fields of study (95%) believed that learning English is
important but they are not well-motivated enough to improve their English
proficiency because they did not have to do so any way, their English language
proficiency is not so good, or they do not have enough time. Therefore, they usually
(in 85% of cases) resorted to the easiest and shortest way to learn English words, i.e.,
memorization.