Repetitive learning of English dental terms for dental university students

Abstract

We examined the effects of repetitive learning of English dental terms in a dental English course for second‐year students at Osaka Dental University. Using vocabulary levels as listed in the online Japanese‐English dictionary Weblio,1 we adopted six words listed as Level 1‐5, five words listed as Level 6‐10, three words listed as Level 11 or higher, and six words with no level listed. Students performed repetitive learning of each word in their dental English course at least three times. The pretest was multiple choice; however, to make the learning effect more evident, we conducted the posttest as a difficult short‐answer test. In the pretest, the rate of correct responses was less than 50% for the three words “molars", “dentin" and “maxilla". In the posttest, despite the change in format to a difficult short‐answer test, the rates of correct responses for all three of the above specific nouns improved. However, for the abstract nouns “checkup" and “prevention", the correct response rates were markedly lower in the posttest. The above results suggest that in the study of English dental terms, a different learning method should be used for abstract terms. (J Osaka Dent Univ 2019; 53: 115‐120)