Sunday Presentations

Although nursing education and language teaching may appear to be unrelated, similarities between these two disciplines can be observed. Many nursing students who want to focus on their core nursing course requirements consider English classes as unnecessary and time-consuming distractions. However, an interdisciplinary teaching approach that incorporates elements of nursing models and theories might help these students establish a connection between their specialty and English language education. This presentation will first introduce the ideas behind the nursing paradigms that nursing students are usually taught in their programs, then give an example of one nursing model and one nursing theory to demonstrate how an understanding of these paradigms can possibly aid nursing students to better understand language learning models and theories such as behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Finally, both the nurse's and language teacher's roles as facilitators for the patient and language learner, respectively, will be discussed.

Eric Fortin is currently an associate professor in the nursing department of St. Mary's College in Fukuoka, where he teaches English and French to nursing students. His interests include nursing student motivation, learner autonomy, and third language education.

Medical care providers are required to read and understand journal articles in order to obtain up-to-date information on clinical practices. This can be difficult for people whose native language is not English. However, an ESP (English for Specific Purposes) classroom approach could help improve students’ reading proficiency. This paper is a pilot study examining the correlation between English proficiency (measured by a modified, internally-used TOEIC test) and the degree of comprehension of journal article abstracts (measured by a comprehension examination). The students’ mean score on the modified TOEIC test was 45.4 out of 70. Their mean score for journal comprehension was 13.8 out of 30. This suggests no significant correlation (r=0.13) between these two skills. Therefore, the presenter advocates that English language educators use abstracts of journal articles as authentic materials to improve journal comprehension for students with an intermediate or higher English proficiency level.

Miki Suehiro used to teach nursing students and hospital nurses how to integrate current clinical information from internet search engines. Now she is developing e-learning type of materials for economic-partnership-agreement candidates. English for Specific Purposes is one of her specializations.

When we ask our nursing students to describe their English language learning goals at the start of the academic year, nearly all of them list “becoming better at speaking in English” as their principal aim. This serves to emphasize the notion that the high cognitive demands of L2 speaking make developing speaking proficiency one of the most challenging L2 learning goals (Tarone, 2005). While many of the nursing students at our institution demonstrate high levels of competence in English reading and writing, most struggle with English speaking tasks – particularly fluency speaking tasks. This presentation explores how we have revised our nursing English curricula in order to try to address this imbalance. In doing so, the presenters will discuss activities and materials that we have used to develop learners’ speaking fluency, including intercultural communicative activities and also task-based activities taught by a trained medical professional.

Paul Mathieson has lived in Japan since 2006, and currently teaches medical students and nursing students at Nara Medical University. His research interests include vocabulary acquisition, content and language integrated learning, and learner motivation.

Rima Ghashut is an ophthalmologist from Libya who recently completed her PhD at Kyoto University. She is working as a medical and nursing English teacher at Nara Medical University. Rima is interested in medical communication skills and language integrated learning.

In this group discussion, we will reflect on the topics encountered over the two days and share our impressions and ideas.

Join us for a postmortem meeting as we look ahead to next year's conference.