I teach English for Specific Purposes at Flinders University's School of Nursing and Midwifery. The international students sometimes struggle on nursing placement and my newly created position is meant to help remedy the situation.

Are those 'Specific Purposes' related to academic language, or professional/workplace language? Do you think this course actually helps somebody to become a nurse, or does it help them with the language of studying a nursing course?

I help students with the kind of language they will need in the workplace, ie medical terms, slang, idiom, etc, and with studying a nursing course, ie genre structure of an essay, report, nursing forms and documents, etc. The 'specific purposes' part comes in because the focus is always on the kind of English needed to do a nursing course and succeed in placement.

Thanks -- I might follow this up shortly. I am interested in the inclusion of a workplace focus, which is so often missing or dreadfully deficient in courses claiming 'specific purposes' or 'professional purposes'. I would be interested in looking at your mix.

Social language is especially important for nurses -- I used to work with Flinders nursing students when I was at the Student Learning Centre there in 2006-7. The question in my mind was often 'do I want this person to be my nurse when I am in hospital?' The pre-study focus on 'academic' language, and the belief that this is all that is necessary to succeed, leads some people astray, I suspect. Now I have similar issues with students in accounting. It might be all about numbers, but someday, somebody wants to talk about those numbers, and they might also only grow to trust the accountant after some chit-chat or small talk puts them at ease -- a similar situation to nurses.

We offer a compulsory 3 unit credit-bearing course to first year Engineering students at The University of Adelaide called Engineering Communication EAL. It's main aim is to teach communication for academic purposes, but we also focus on Engineering workplace communication. Last semester, we ran four hours of workshops for students, with invited speakers from industry giving their views on workplace communication. In the second workshop we ran mock employment interviews using senior students as 'job applicants'. Student feedback was very positive.

Nevertheless, Ray, many of our international students complete their Engineering undergraduate degrees with adequate English to pass the Engineering course, but not to satisfy employers. Employers want engineers who write very well and create a positive public face for the company in their reports and client contact. There is a substantial gap between English for Academic Purposes and English for employment and workplace purposes.

Dear all - like many others, I've been developing various resources and strategies over the years to address the sorts of issues referred to in this discussion. I'm pleased to see that the specific language development needs of NESB students are on the table for high level discussion and planning across institutions themselves, not just amongst people like us. The fact that the Good Practice Principles document released last year is now influencing the external quality auditing of university teaching means that money is flowing into research and development in this area. My institution, for example, has recently funded two significant projects - one a large scale mapping exercise to see exactly what is going on across the institution to develop the language proficiency of international students from various providers (everything from pre-enrolment prep courses at the institution's private language college on campus, to extra-curricular voluntary social activities aiming to develop conversational English, to credit bearing subjects of various shapes and sizes offered by Arts, Education and Learning Development). The work I do for LD is focused on curriculum-integrated language development - and the other project that the institution has funded this year is one I'm running to develop 'learning designs' that can be widely shared amongst and adapted by any faculty trying to teach a disciplinary subject to students who are in need of serious language development while they are developing disciplinary knowledge. So I'll also be very keen to discuss and share information and ideas with people joining this thread. The learning designs I'm working on are about collaboratively designing curricula to simultaneously develop students' knowledge of the target discipline and its language. And the definition of 'language' I'm going by is one that includes every level, from discourse-semantics to vocabulary.

Whatever model of language-focused subject we operate here (in LD@UOW), the aim is to work very closely with faculty staff to develop tasks, resources and supports that lead to jointly defined learning outcomes - some of our subjects are very workplace oriented (ICT engineering), others are more academically oriented (Master of Science). I'm trying to develop sharable subject designs, and associated tasks, resources and interaction sequences, which clarify the objectives according to the needs of the situation.

thanks for raising the topic Ray :)

Thanks, Karen.

While I am familiar with some your group's work, it's good to get the detail laid out here.