EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AUTHENTIC DIALOGUE AND SPANISH FOR HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS
Journal Title: Journal of Languages for Specific Purposes (JLSP) - Year 2017, Vol 1, Issue 4
Abstract
Although linguistic studies of healthcare communication are common for English dialects, they are less frequent for Spanish. Furthermore, linguistic research is virtually non-existent for Ecuadorian healthcare discourse, primarily occurring in literature on anthropology rather than linguistics per se. The present study therefore uses a qualitative approach to examine videotaped dialogues between ten Spanish-speaking patients and two Spanish-speaking physicians at a hospital in eastern Ecuador. The study’s goal was to observe naturally occurring communication to determine how patients and family physicians negotiated meaning in medical interviews. Dialogues were transcribed using a conversational analysis methodology and then were specifically analyzed by applying Cordella’s (2004) notion of physician “voices” to investigate ways that doctors conveyed different roles they had during an interview. Examples of the “Doctor, Educator, and Fellow Human” voices were reflected in the data, both in complementary and overlapping contexts. A secondary goal of the study was to provide videos of authentic medical interviews for use in teaching aspects of conversation to students taking intermediate Spanish for pre-health professions. Responses to questions about the video suggested that as students worked to improve their comprehension in a clinical context, the video dialogue raised their awareness about pragmatic notions such as politeness and register, “voices” (or roles) that physicians and patients use in cooperative/non-cooperative interaction, certain discourse markers, and embedded cultural beliefs about health. As a result, authentic dialogue within this specific context, that of medical Spanish interviews, served as a meaningful method for teaching pragmatic concepts, negotiation of meaning, and culturally implied information. It is therefore likely that authentic health conversations such as those in this study can inform language education for medical professionals and, by extension, that domain-specific dialogue likely has practical applications in other areas of instruction in languages for specific purposes.
Authors and Affiliations
Karol Hardin
Keywords
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- EP ID EP278167
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