It takes two: Sharing language skills and cultural insights with EAL students preparing for work placements

Abstract

This paper reports on collaboration between a Learning Development lecturer and a Nursing lecturer working with English as an additional language (EAL) nursing students. We set up voluntary sessions, with the aim of helping the students to develop communication skills for clinical practice. These sessions were jointly facilitated with input based on our different perspectives - sociolinguistic information via authentic nursing dialogues from Caroline and hands-on nursing topics from Hongyan. Our on-going needs analysis and evaluation process established that despite the brevity of the sessions, students felt they had developed greater awareness of the demands of clinical practice, greater facility in using the language of nursing and, most importantly, confidence to express themselves effectively. This experience of collaboration informed us about each other's disciplines and gave us opportunities to closely observe student interactions. We are currently working on a related research project.