• Salah Elnaeem Mohamed Eltom

  Author

English language as means of instruction poses difficulties to students in medical education who
are non-English language speakers. The aim of this research is to investigate the actual
problems that the students face in using English language in different settings, this research is an
attempt to find and tacklethe reasons that cause the difficulties encountered by the students.
English and Arabic belong to different language group and, thus, have different rules and uses,
therefore, problems and difficulties are attributedto such differences, in this respect, problematic
areas were found are uses of different aspects of English language. In addition to one of the
underlying reasons is also the confusion resulting from the use of grammar rules of both classic
and colloquial Arabic.The difficulties which were examined are classified into three linguistic
categories; grammatical, morphological, and lexical difficulties.
The data of this research is in written form, and the number of the students who participated in
this research is (102) from Khartoum College of Medical Sciences, thus, the corpus used to find
answers to the research questions were taken mainly from the students reports about scientific
experiments and answer scripts or papers (test papers) of the students.
Meaning of words in context is not considered by the students when they translate form Arabic
into English, that the intended meaning cannot be obtained when considering meaning of words
in isolation when a word is replaced by its equivalent in the target language, thus, lexical
difficulties facing the students refer to the interference of mother tongue in English language. This
research is concerned with the problems that medical students face when writing short answers
and reports during scientific experiments, these problems actually hindered the students from
producing good English sentences.

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