The Linguistic Gap in Doctor-Patient Communication in Algeria
Journal Title: Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature - Year 2017, Vol 41, Issue 1
Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to shed some light on language use in the Algerian healthcare settings where a multilingual situation is prevailing. It reports on communication and linguistic barriers that both patients and doctors encounter during medical visits. The Algerian physicians are taught and trained exclusively in French. Thus, they feel more comfortable when they use French as it enables them to be more informative when they speak about symptoms, diagnosis and treatments. Consequently, when they talk to their patients they inevitably use much French and medical terms which are likely to be unintelligible mainly when they address patients who are not bilinguals or have little or no health literacy in the French language. Thus, we suppose that communication problems arise as a result of linguistic barriers which are due to issues related to proficiency levels in some language varieties, mainly French, as it predominates over Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Algerian Arabic (AA) and the other Algerian local varieties in the Algerian healthcare settings.
Authors and Affiliations
Khadidja Belaskri
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP388319
- DOI 10.17951/lsmll.2017.41.2.1
- Views 74
- Downloads 0
L’interprétation des unités phraséologiques entre combinatoire interne et emploi co-textuel : le cas des unités adverbiales polylexicales
We propose to study, in this work, the semantic functioning of phraséological adverbial units. How can they make sense in their external combinatorics? What relationship do they have with the units around them? Do they i...
"The stillness is the time before the change" – celebrating the Canadian North and Northern environment in Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air
A great deal of Elizabeth Hay's novel entitled Late Nights on Air takes place in Yellowknife, a town in the Northwest Territories of Canada, situated on the edge of the Arctic Circle. In 1974 Judge Thomas Berger came the...
Fiction de la mémoire et création de la vie chez Georges Perec
In 1975, Georges Perec published W ou le souvenir d’enfance, a work that is both fictional and autobiographical, and in which there are two different systems of enunciation side by side, thus opposing the distinction dra...
De l’effondrement de l’étalon-or au crépuscule des idoles dans Les Faux-monnayeurs d’André Gide
In André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs, counterfeit money and characters flow in a plot based on a circulatory system in which they seem to be interchangeable. Ideas flow as well in the novel, creating a polyphonic intertex...
Crossing the Borders of Tradition: Alma López’s Our Lady (1999) and Our Lady of Controversy II (2008).
The focus of my paper is Alma López who draws from indigenous traditions and archetypes in order to rewrite them from a feminist perspective and provide Latinas with alternative paradigms for the construction of the 21st...