Author Description

This dissertation, "Need Analysis for a Chinese-language Course for Medical Students at the University of Hong Kong" by Lap-ki, Chan,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Many non-English-speaking countries and regions are establishing medical programmes using English as the sole medium of instruction, with the aim of producing global leaders who can function without communicative barriers. However, graduates from these programmes still have to use the local, non-English language to communicate with their local patients. The aim of this study is to examine whether these graduates experience any difficulty in communicating with their patients in the local language. We looked at the medical graduates of The University of Hong Kong as a specific example. The results of the study can be used for designing a local language course in these programmes. Graduates from the MBBS program of The University of Hong Kong were invited to take part, using selective, convenience and snowball sampling methods. Nineteen subjects voluntarily took part. Semi-structured interviews were individually conducted, and were based on a framework of questions in the four areas of Chinese language usage: reading, listening, writing, and speaking. All subjects indicated a certain degree of difficulty in using Chinese language in their clinical practice. In reading professional medical documents in Chinese, they had problems in recognizing the hand-written and the simplified Chinese characters. They also had difficulty in understanding the meanings of the words, in particular the Chinese medical terms, their variants,