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A Study of Chinese Medical Students As Dictionary Users and Potential Users for an Online Medical Termfinder

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A Study of Chinese Medical Students As Dictionary Users and Potential Users for an Online Medical Termfinder Lexicography ASIALEX https://doi.org/10.1007/s40607-017-0031-9 ORIGINAL PAPER A study of Chinese medical students as dictionary users and potential users for an online medical termfinder Jun Ding1 Received: 2 May 2017 / Accepted: 12 November 2017 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2017 Abstract This paper examines the dictionary use of Chinese medical students as ESP learners and their trial experience with the online Health Termfinder (HTF), a specialized dictionary tool for medical terms. Empirical data were collected first from a survey among a group of medical students at Fudan University on their previous dictionary-use behaviors and initial response to the introduction to the HTF and its bilingualization, and second from an assignment of using the bilingualized HTF for reading comprehension with the same group of students. The survey findings reveal that the medical students in general are aware of the importance of dictionaries in their ESP learning in spite of the alarming fact that the majority of them have not even used any English medical dictionaries (monolingual or bilin- gual). They are thus quite open to the idea of using an online termbank of spe- cialized medical terms. But the HTF assignment findings also show that proper guidance and training is necessary for the termbank to be made actually useful for the lexical needs of Chinese ESP learners. It is also expected that the students’ feedback on their HTF experience, especially their demand for the termbank to include more cross-disciplinary medical terms, could be taken into consideration by the HTF builders. Keywords Chinese medical students Á Dictionary use for ESP learning Á Online medical termbank Á The bilingualized health termfinder & Jun Ding [email protected] 1 Fudan University, Shanghai, China 123 Lexicography ASIALEX 1 Introduction With medical students in China, learning English is as indispensable for their study as breathing air is for life. It is a largely acknowledged fact that Chinese medical students have to reach a high level of English proficiency for their academic studies (Guo et al. 2011; Xu et al. 2013). This means they have their particular linguistic needs as all ESP (English for special purposes) learners do (Northcott and Brown 2006). As is rightly pointed out by Peters and Fernandez (2013) in their study on the lexical needs of Spanish students majoring in architecture, ‘‘specialized dictionaries (bilingual and monolingual) are an obvious resource for them (ESP students) to go to’’ (237). Similarly, Chinese students majoring in medicine in theory need to go to specialized medical dictionaries (bilingual and monolingual) for their ESP learning. But is this what happens in reality? What exactly does the real picture look like? Answers to these questions are very difficult to obtain. Though in recent years many studies have been done in China on how medical students learn English (Liao et al. 2006; Ma and Liu 2009; Zeng and Wang 2010;Bi2012;Li2014), little consideration has even been given to the dictionary use of medical students in their ESP learning. A similar scarcity of research into dictionary use for ESP students in the west was actually observed by Gromann and Schnitzer (2015) in their empirical study on the dictionary use of business students in an Austrian university. Their hypotheses about the Austrian students’ general dictionary-use habits, formulated for testing in the first part of their study (2015: 3–8), inspired the current study in designing a survey for investigating the dictionary use of a group of students from the medical school of Fudan University in Shanghai, with a view to contributing some insights into this particular field which seems so under-investigated. But this study also has a more practical agenda apart from the theoretical research into dictionary use and the ESP user perspective. It investigates the potential usefulness of an online medical termbank for Chinese medical students, which is currently under construction in the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University in Sydney. Codenamed Health Termfinder (HTF), it is also undergoing bilingual- ization into Chinese in the English Department at Fudan University. Therefore, the survey of dictionary use among the medical students also contains questions aimed at soliciting their initial response to accessing such a bilingualized medical termbank. The survey thus forms only the first part of this study; it then proceeds to its second stage: asking the same group of students to go through an assignment of using the ‘‘breast cancer’’ subset of HTF after its completion and full bilingual- ization. The assignment results are closely analyzed (in Sect. 4). Together with the findings from the survey (Sect. 3), they are expected to provide the HTF builders and Chinese translators with firsthand user feedback to refer to in further developing and improving the termbank for better future use. 123 Lexicography ASIALEX 2 Background and method of the study The development of medical science in China owes a lot to the translation of western medical literature which had inevitably created the need for bilingual English–Chinese medical dictionaries from the very beginning (Chen 1984;Fu 1990; Ma et al. 1993; Sun 2010). Ever since the earliest English–Chinese medical glossary, Benjamin Hobson’s (1816–1873) A Medical Vocabulary in English and Chinese, was published in 1858, various bilingual medical dictionaries have been made over the past one and a half centuries, the majority of them based on monolingual English medical dictionaries. They usually offer only Chinese equivalents and translations of illustrative examples, but no definitions for the head entries either in English or Chinese are included. Among them, An English– Chinese Medical Dictionary (editor-in-chief Weiyi Chen 1984, 1997, 2009, 2014) is a translation work of Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary, widely acknowl- edged as one of the most authoritative and popular in China (Li and Chen 2006;Li 2016). It was a dictionary project carried out by English teachers at the Medical School at Fudan University. But whether bilingual medical dictionaries of this type are useful for Chinese medical students as ESP learners remains so underexplored that English teachers for the Fudan medical students did not seem to have any idea when questioned about it in a preliminary survey conducted by the current author (see below Sect. 2.3). Meanwhile, the availability of Health Termfinder (HTF), an online information tool for medical terms, prompted this study of dictionary use among Fudan medical students because they are seen as potential users of its bilingualized version. The ongoing construction and sustainable updating of HTF are expected in turn to be informed by the findings of this study. We will then start with an introduction to the HTF. 2.1 Health termfinder and its bilingualization Recent lexicographic studies on specialized online dictionaries all support the idea that in the digital era such a lexicographic product ought to be realized with joint efforts from three parties, namely lexicographers, experts in the subject field, and IT experts (Klosa 2013; Fuertes-Olivera and Tarp 2014; Fuertes-Olivera 2016). The Health TermFinder (HTF) platform for medical terminologies is a specialized online dictionary with exactly this joint-compilation model (Peters et al. 2016), currently under construction in the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University, Sydney. Experienced lexicographers, trained linguists with computer expertise, and profes- sors of medicine from the Faculty of Medical Science of the same university are all involved in building the HTF. One singular feature that distinguishes the HTF from other information tools of the same type is that it offers definitions for medical terminologies in plain English, as opposed to the more strictly professional ones in traditional medical dictionaries (Ding et al. 2015: 127). This is because the HTF is designed to be of use to second-language medical workers and native English speakers without tertiary education in Australia. The HTF includes an ever-growing number of termbanks representing the subdisciplines of major diseases. For 123 Lexicography ASIALEX instance, the first HTF termbank focuses on ‘‘breast cancer’’, thus consisting chiefly of breast cancer terminologies plus a few general medical terms that are of particular relevance or importance to the disease in question. Meanwhile, the companion project of bilingualizing the termbank into Chinese is being undertaken at the English Department at Fudan University in Shanghai. At its trial stage, the bilingualized version has as its target users students from the Medical School of Fudan University (both undergraduate and graduate students). As of May 2017, 67 webpages have been finished by the Macquarie team and bilingualized into Chinese by the Fudan team. It is the ‘‘breast cancer’’ termbank of HTF that the Fudan medical students were asked trial for this study. 2.2 Two stages of the study At the Medical School of Fudan University, each semester over 1000 medical students (undergraduate and postgraduate) sit in compulsory classes of medical English. Such a large number of potential users for the HTF are the major motivation for this project. For the current study, 71 junior students from two classes of College Medical English were recruited. The study is divided into two stages: the first for a survey on the students’ dictionary use in ESP learning and initial response to the introduction of the HTF; and the second for a termbank assignment to examine their trial experience with it. During the first stage while bilingualization of the breast cancer termbank was still under way (October, 2016), the students were given a two-part survey to investigate their previous use of dictionaries, and their readiness and expectations for the HTF, which was introduced to them in a presentation by the author. The survey contains closed and open questions rather than multiple choices so as to offset the known disadvantages of questionnaires (Tarp 2009; Lew 2011).
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