چكيده
This study aim at finding out the English language needs of medicine students and General Practitioners in an EFL context, from the perspectives of medical students, general practitioners, EFL instructors and subject-matter instructors. To this end, a Needs Analysis (NA) was conducted to find out whether the General English (GE) and English for Medical Purposes (EMP) programs meet the English needs of medicine students. In order to collect the required data, questionnaires were used. The questionnaires were administered to 110 female and male students from Guilan University of Medical Sciences, who had already taken General English and English for Medical purposes courses. In addition, the questionnaire was responded by 40 general practitioners who graduated from Guilan University and they work in different hospitals in Rasht city currently, and among 3 EFL instructors and 12 Subject-matter instructors. The questionnaires were constructed based, in part, on information gained from informal interviews, on questionnaires used in previous needs analysis conducted in medical contexts (Akgul, 1991; Boztas, 1988; Chia et al, 1998) and on the literature on ESP and EMP. The questionnaires were in Persian to avoid any misunderstanding by the respondents. The findings of the study showed that both medical students and general practitioners valued reading skill higher than the other language skills followed by writing skill. However, speaking skill had the least significance for both groups. According to the fact that actual needs of medicine students generally change across time and educational settings, the EMP instructor should try to find the real needs of the learners and assess the effectiveness of his/her course based on the investigation of changing needs of the students. The results also revealed that the English language courses that the medicine students took at the college level were not adequate according to the use of English language in their field of study.
