The Problem of Teaching Romanian as a Foreign Language to Students at Faculties of Medicine II

Abstract

The case study we propose is conducted on the practical courses of Romanian for foreign students in the first and second years of study at the Faculty of Medicine, who embark on a process of acquisition of phonetic and lexical information, grammar, culture, and especially notions of specialised communication. The assertion we start from is that the common feature that foreign students share is that they are speakers of various languages – Romance languages, Germanic, Slavic, Turkic, Finno-Ugric ones etc. The characteristic feature of student groups at Medicine is that there are few students with oral and written communication skills in Romanian (expect Slavic speakers, who live in neighbouring countries – Bulgaria, Serbia, etc) and they will be integrated, for methodological reasons in Group A. The proposed objective here is to study the role of language contact in making the teaching of Romanian more effective. Similarly few are the students who master theoretical notions of Phonetics and Morphology (German students and those who come from Albania) who belong to group B. The aspect to be studied in depth in the case of Group B students focuses on the need for a contrastive, comparative method of teaching Romanian. Arabic students, those coming from India, USA, Nordic countries, France, Portugal, Spain who never came into contact with speakers of Romanian do not have the ability to communicate with speakers of Romanian nor the capacity to understand various simple messages, reason for which they are placed in Group C. Access to theoretical concepts of Romanian grammar is very difficult for students in this latter group. The general conclusion to be drawn is that teaching Romanian as a foreign language to students of Medicine is a permanent challenge regarding methodology, didactic strategies, and particularities of their native tongues.