Question

1-List and explain the various barriers that may occur in your university?

2- what steps can be taken to overcome it ?

Each question should take 1 full page .

The barriers that I want you to write about is English language . Our native language is Arabic .therefore, the communication will be hard . And so on

My major is Nursing .

Answer 1

A language barrier is a phrase that describes a barrier or block in communications between different languages or dialects.

The difficulty experienced by us, the Arab nurses of has been attributed to several factors, including the influence of the first language (Arabic influence); mode of teaching; teaching methods used. As a consequence, a context is created in which the we must demonstrate the wiliness to make a fool of ourself in the trial-and-error attempt of speaking and understanding english.

We experience difficulty learning the language and using it in communication. This is because we lack the necessary resource to communicate freely. Pronunciation is probably one of the hardest skills in English to learn. It takes a lot of time and effort to improve pronunciation. As nurses we face Difficulties communicating with colleagues, patients and their families in the clinical setting.

English pronunciation differs from spelling in many cases, especially in silent letters. Also, difficulties in pronouncing certain consonants and vowels add to the difficulty. When engaging in authentic communicative situations, we often lack the necessary vocabulary that we need to get the meaning across. As a result, we cannot keep the interaction going for an extended period of time with our non arabic colleagues, patients and their families. We continue to show inability to express ourselves comfortably and efficiently either when dealing with 'academic topics' or 'common everyday topics' or to provide adequate information to the patients that we are dealing. Our major difficulty arises from the fact that we cannot use English correctly and appropriately in and out the classroom when required to do so. This means that the difficulty is related to the our deficiencies in communicative competence and self-expression.

Pronunciation of English words is also problematic since we often use Arabic phonetics to pronounce words.The same is true on the use of English prepositions; due to the varied nature and usage of prepositions in English, we opt to translate each Arabic preposition in English. Due to these shortcomings we fail in the  provision of culturally competent care. Miscommunication in the healthcare sector can be life-threatening. Language discrepancies may result in increased psychological stress and medically significant communication errors between the nurses and their patients.

Some difficulties relate to English language proficiency includes: understanding lectures; reading and writing academic English; using the technical language of healthcare while in the clinical setting. Cultural and language issues are major barriers in both adjusting to the university environment and achieving academically.

We nursing students often choose not to speak out in class in English out of apprehension, which may prevent us from acquiring help from teachers, even though we are would be provided with highly tailored teaching input, interaction, and feedback. We face difficulties in comprehending lectures, taking part in tutorial discussions, writing essays and theses, reading course books and designated articles, and communicating with lecturers. Hence, poor English language competence has caused to be a strong barrier to the optimal clinical performance. It also makes it even difficult to understand some of the health terminologies. When communicating the details of a diagnosis or treatment, it is crucial to convey accurately the likelihood of the associated risk factors. Failure to communicate properly the seriousness of risk can have negative consequences

Steps can be taken to overcome it:

About one-third of Bachelor degree courses are taught in Arabic. It would be more helpful if such courses were taught in English rather than in Arabic.

All university courses except Arabic language course(s) should be taught in English, which would certainly improve the students' linguistic ability, which would, in turn, improve their communicative competence.

English language departments should offer solid language training. In order for nursing students to use the language more successfully while conversing with patients, their families, other health care professionals, they should be involved in real-life situations.

In addition, currently about 94% of the professors in the English Language Department are native speakers of Arabic. Instead they should be obliged to use English as a medium of communication.

Motivation also plays an important part in improving and developing learners' communicativeability. The main stimulus for learning English is instrumental, i.e., to achieve a goal, e.g. a career. Those with integrative motivation have a genuine interest in "the target speech community" which the learner is"aspiring to become a member of.

Studying the language is a great way of being able to at least understand the basics of the language, if not become fluent! Fluency in language is very unlikely, but one can at least pick up some of the idiosyncrasies of the language, this will help if we find ourself coming up against a language barrier.

Speak in fewer syllables: With this technique, language barrier communication issues can be circumvented a lot easier.

Write it down:  One is able to write a word out, enunciate it and learn how it works in terms of what syllables and accents make it up.

In clinical setting, Many simple needs can be defined through imitating actions – eating, drinking, and taking a short walk, for instance. More complex conversations will need the help of a trusted family member who speaks English or a translator.

English language must become a mandate and the nursing students must be given ample opportunities to improve their vocabulary by encouraging them to teach any of their topics in front of the class, motivate the students to conduct certain standard operating procedures to their classmates that would help them gain confidence in speaking english.

Teachers should provide the nursing students with the definition of CSs ( communication strategies) and ask them to perform tasks that require them to use CSs, such as definition of certain health terminologies and story-telling, role-play, history taking of the patients. Then, they should be audio-/or video-recorded while performing these tasks. Finally, they should watch their performance in the target language and be asked to see the communication problems they encountered and how they managed to solve them. Communication strategy is not an indication of communication failure; on the contrary, it can be very successful in compensating for the lack of linguistic knowledge, and they can help the English language learners solve their communication problems and achieve their communicative goals.

  All teachers and learners need to understand that successful language learning is not only a matter of developing grammatical, sociolinguistic and semantic competence, but also the strategic competence which involves the use of CSs to transmit comprehensible information successfully.