Challenges in promoting sustainable use of mobile technologies in developing medical terminology for doctor trainees

Abstract

Mobile technologies offer second language learners opportunities to make use of multimodal learning resources, communicate collaboratively and develop their self-regulated learning skills. However, in medical education, the sustainable use of mobiles in the support of learning terminology for second language doctor trainees has not been widely investigated. Guided by the literature on vocabulary learning strategies and taxonomy of vocabulary knowledge, this study interviewed 22 Indian students studying at a national medical university in mainland China, to explore their preferred ways of learning medical vocabulary with mobile devices and the justifications behind their choices. The results indicated two types of challenges that prevented the sustainable use of mobiles in learning medical vocabulary. First, social and affective learning strategies were rarely applied with the assistance of mobile devices or applications, and current mobile technologies mostly supported the use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. Secondly, the opportunities for learners to develop their productive vocabulary knowledge have been reported to be much fewer than when it comes to receptive vocabulary knowledge. To achieve sustainable development of vocabulary learning for L2 medical students, the digital affordances of mobile technologies should be designed and integrated with the curriculum in medical education.