An Analysis Of Medical Students’ Needs For College English

Medical students have a higher expectation for English comparing to students of other majors because of the high requirement of their major. They are required to learn medical English after two years’ general English study. But in this process, many of them encounter great difficulties in merging general college English into medical English. Therefore, it is of great necessity to help medical students achieve successful transition. However, after literature reviewing, the author found that most of the previous researches aim at the college English teaching or medical English teaching separately, few of them relating these two together.Needs analysis was firstly applied to the field of ESP, and then was gradually applied to general English as an indispensable tool and method to verify the specific teaching factors like teaching material and teaching methodology. Based on the theoretical framework of Hutchinson & Waters, this study employs both qualitative and quantitative research methods to investigate the learning needs of medical students on College English, so as to provide critical evidence for the development and tailoring of curricula of medical schools and then better meet the learning needs of medical students. Questionnaire survey and interviews are conducted among the 175 medical students from the Youjiang Medical College for Nationalities. The research questions of the research are: 1) what are the learning motivations of medical students; 2) what are the learning process needs of medical students; 3) what are the learning environment needs of medical students?The research results show that medical students possess strong motivation and serious attitude to English learning and expect teachers integrate college English with medical knowledge. Meanwhile, they show a high degree of recognition on their English teachers’ quality but still consider the current teaching methodology could not meet their needs of getting improvement in listening and speaking. Besides, their use of learning strategy and their satisfaction with the current teaching material are both at medium level. At the end, pedagogical implications are offered for the college English teachers to improve the efficiency of language teaching. First, students motivation should be actively stimulated. Second, learning strategy training should be conducted. Third, suitable teaching material should be carefully selected. Finally, more English learning activities should be carried out.