Discovery and Consolidation Strategies in Learning Medical English at the North Khorasan University of Medical Sciences

This study aimed at investigating the strategies adopted by North Khorasan University of Medical Sciences medical and paramedical students in learning English medical vocabulary.
In this study, 124 students of North Khorasan University of Medical Sciences (37 males and 87 females) were asked to answer Schmitt''s (1997) questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by the SPSS software.
The analysis of the data obtained from this study revealed significant points about the student's vocabulary learning behaviors. First, most of the students used strategy No. 4, "guess meaning from textual context" to discover the meaning of the words and students found strategy number 5, "use a bilingual dictionary", as the most useful. Moreover, the strategy adopted by Iranian students to consolidate the meaning of words, i.e. "verbal repetition", had the highest percentage of usage. The most useful consolidation strategies, according to the results of this study, were "image word's meaning", "take notes in class", and "continue to study words over time".
The findings indicated that guessing the meaning from context and dictionary use strategies were the most popular strategies while asking the teacher for meaning was rarely used. Teachers should teach how to guess the meaning from context and to use dictionary in the class to increase vocabulary knowledge.