Overview
What Is Language Proficiency?
From a toddler saying words to a PhD student defending their dissertation, the range of language proficiency expands beyond the ability to use language fluidly. While the novice levels focus on using basic language, from words to complete sentences, higher proficiency levels are distinguished by complexity of language structures, organization of ideas, and quality of response. In other words, higher levels of proficiency illustrate cognitive abilities (like defending a dissertation) in addition to linguistic fluidity.
Nursing Academic Language
The technical language of health care can be difficult to navigate, even for heritage English speakers. Although English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) nursing students are proficient in English, the linguistic demands of nursing education pose challenges. This goes beyond understanding the definition of words like "ischemia." Students must juggle the cognitive demands of synthesizing nursing concepts and developing clinical judgment skills while simultaneously building fluency in medical jargon. Providing cross-linguistic support to EAL students can help build fluency in healthcare language and bolster interpretive skills within the context of nursing education.
Resources
Medical Terminology
Embedding these tools in courses helps students build fluency in medical terminology and allows them to leverage their other language(s) to decode information.
- This Orbis-created Interactive Nursing Glossary provides terms with their abbreviations, definitions, examples, pronunciations, and images to make concepts relatable. There are also self-check questions for each term to provide practice opportunities.
- Got a term you would like to add? Fill out the form to request your addition.
- Clinical Terminology for International and U.S. Students is a free course by Coursera that shares strategies to decome medical terminology and abbreviations.
- Provide links to multilingual dictionaries to support linguistically diverse students.
- WordReference contains numerous bilingual dictionaries along with language forums, and most languages offer two-way translation (e.g, from Spanish to English or from English to Spanish). Translation search results typically include definitions by context and examples of word usage.
- The Unified Medical Dictionary, provided by the WHO, supplies translations for medical terms in Arabic, English, French, German, and Spanish.
Healthcare Content
These resources help students sharpen their interpretive skills within the context of nursing education.
- The Clinical Interactions Self-Assessment helps students to check their listening skills to identify the main idea, connect key details, or infer meaning for two clinical scenarios and two lectures.
- The Academic Literacy Self-Assessment allows students to evaluate their ability to interpret academic texts related to nursing.
- The Accelerated Nursing School Preparation document compiles resources for prospective or new nursing students who wish to gain familiarity with medical terminology and nursing concepts.
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