Abstract
The first part of the paper deals with historical conditions of the grammatically oriented way of medical terminology instruction in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The next part summarizes the most important problems resulting from the grammatical way of the instruction, namely the association of the factually incoherent vocabulary, the lack of empiricism in developing instructional materials, the preference of formal language forms over factual contents of medical terms and the low level of description of the real medical terminology used in practice.
Based on these problems the author is convinced of necessity for the implementing innovations in medical terminology instruction. All attempts at innovations must be however preceded by a broad discussion among experts, namely teachers and doctors, leading to establishing basic consensual instructional objectives.
After precisely establishing objectives we will only be able to define the appropriate proposal of the innovative content. The last part of the paper brings out the author's suggestions of the potential objectives, which are: 1) to acquire the basic terminological competencies, 2) to acquire a knowledge of the nature of the medical technical language, 3) to improve the general cultural and historical knowledge.
The respective contents or instructional conceptions subsequently result from these objectives. In the first case the instruction fully focuses on isolated medical terms of Latin or Greek origin, in the second one the instruction aims at description of medical technical language as a whole and in the last one at acquiring basic terminological competencies and general cultural and historical knowledge besides.