AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE CURRENT STATUS OF LEARNING CHINESE FOR TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE AMONG STUDENTS MAJORING IN TRADITIONAL MEDICINE AT THE HUE UNIVERSITY OF MEDICINE AND PHARMACY

This study aims to examine the current status of learning Chinese for Traditional Chinese Medicine (Chinese for TCM) among students majoring in Traditional Medicine at Hue University of Medicine and Pharmacy. Quantitative data collected from a 20-item questionnaire with 133 students were analyzed with SPSS version 26. The findings indicate that 74.6% of the respondents either frequently or occasionally fail to understand lecture content, primarily because of linguistic challenges, particularly in memorizing and translating specialized terminology, which hampers their comprehension. This study also investigated students' expectations of instructors. The results show that students expressed a desire for additional reinforcement of vocabulary and grammar through more practice exercises, such as grammar-focused drills and sentence construction using new vocabulary. Besides, only 8.3% of the students reported employing useful learning strategies such as searching for online materials or using AI-based tools to support their learning, indicating that most of them have not yet learned how to leverage these resources to enhance their learning effectiveness. This study proposes several guidelines for innovating the teaching and learning of Chinese for TCM.