Kate,
At my college, we are in the situation you describe every year. This year a couple of non-traditional nursing students from Pacific islands, an Indian student and a traditional student from Southeast Asia who has been in the States since junior high, are struggling. Unlike you, however, we are not using a computer program for the tutoring--I am the non-ESL person who works with them. Most English-language tutoring programs focus on conversational English, and they can already do that.
These students read English very well, and one speaks it with no accent at all; but understanding lectures and peer presentations containing higher-level academic and nursing terminology is the problem. I don't think we have ever had a single ESL student get through our BSN program in 8 semesters--the language issues usually kick in enough to slow them down at the junior year, or sometimes not until the senior year, but it almost always happens. They wind up taking one or two courses twice before they graduate, and they finally come to me for help when they are required to come after the first failure. Most do pass the NCLEX on the first try, and we've never had any ESL student need to take it more than twice, so that's something.
The strategy that has worked best for me over the years is academic conversation. I build personal trust as quickly as I can (I had the experience of moving to another country, in which no one in my family spoke the language), then let them know I will do everything I can to facilitate their success. We have fun, friendly, informal chats for 30-60 minutes at a time, once or twice a week, but I gently correct pronunciations and sentence structure at every incidence of error. I write notes and draw pictures and give comparison and contrast illustrations. I ham it up. We laugh a lot. Often we have a topic that we discuss in depth. Sometimes it's academic, sometimes cultural, sometimes social. When I noticed that these students did not understand our idioms, I did an informal observation of just one short college meeting I attended, and noticed 9 idiom used--we American do this a lot!
So I really emphasize understanding idioms--"ham it up," "speaking off the top of my head," "a wall issue," "neither here nor there," "fried," "staying on top of things," "wind up doing...," "kick in,"....I could go on and on. Your description of the LPN is so much like so many of our students, I would not hesitate to recommend this to you, even thought I have done no formal research to support it.
One other thing I might mention: we have a very long history of English-speaking LPN students having difficulty with baccalaureate nursing courses when they get to the upper-level thinking, so you may have two issues going on. The LPN students who return to school had an education built largely on foundational practical behaviors, and most have worked, doing practical skills, for many years. Time after time, when "new" nursing material is presented, instead of thinking theoretically, they immediately recall a personal experience with a patient that had that issue, and that becomes their model. Making the leap (another idiom) to conceptual thinking and taking tests based on theory and best-practice models is difficult for them, almost without exception.
Linda Riggs Mayfield
-----Original Message-----
From: Open Forum for Learning Assistance Professionals [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Christine Zielinski
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 4:15 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: ESL Issue In Nursing Courses
Please reply to list. We see similar problems and are in a similar situation.
Chris
>>> Kate Jakobson <[log in to unmask]> 4/24/2009 2:56 PM >>>
Hi All:
I've just been presented with an interesting issue. One of our nursing
instructors called concerning a Level I (LPN) nursing student from Vietnam
who is struggling, not with individual words, but with whole sentence
semantics. She understands the words but is having problems with the
meaning of the sentences. This problem is cropping up for her particularly
with exam questions. She's been in the states for 15 years, is an excellent
student with a good grasp of listening, reading, speaking, and writing
English but is struggling with analysis, synthesis, and evaluation-level
meaning and questions.
We have such a minimal ESL program (1-2 students/year) that the college has
gone to a computer program and individual tutoring (with a non-ESL person)
for any ESL students who enroll and I've certainly never had this issue come
up at the level of the nursing content. So this is new for me and I simply
cannot think of any resources that we currently have that might help her.
Does anyone have any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions? Any help is, as
always, appreciated.
Kate
Kate Jakobson, Director
Tutoring and Student Success
Kirtland Community College
Roscommon, MI 48653
989.275.5000 x 211
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