Words matter: Translanguaging in medical communication skills training
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Perspect Med Educ https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-020-00595-z
Words matter: Translanguaging in medical communication skills training Pilar Ortega
· Josh Prada
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Medical communication across languages is gaining attention as the multilingual character of local, regional, and national populations across the world continues to grow. Effectively communicating with patients involves not only learning medical terminology, but also understanding the community’s linguistic practices, and gaining the ability to explain health concepts in patient-centered language. Language concordance between physicians and patients improves patient outcomes, but methods to teach communication skills for physicians are usually limited to the majority or official language. For example, in U.S. medical schools increased demand for physician skills in other languages, such as Spanish, has resulted in renewed academic discourse about best practices in teaching practical communication skills for physicians. In language education, translanguaging is an approach that integrates and validates multilingual individuals’ real use of language, which often includes non-standard words, regionalisms, and mixed influences from multiple languages, such as Spanglish or Chinglish. Efforts to improve medical language concordance by teaching a second language to medical students would benefit from an understanding of patient-centered communication strategies, such as is supported by translanguaging. Teaching effective communication skills to physicians should evolve and engage with the fluid linguistic atP. Ortega () Departments of Emergency Medicine and Medical Education, College of Medicine, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA [email protected] J. Prada Spanish Applied Linguistics for World Languages and Cultures, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, IN, USA
tributes of culturally and linguistically diverse patient populations. In this eye opener, we first introduce the translanguaging perspective as an approach that can increase attention to patient-centered communication, which often includes spontaneous practices that transcend the traditional boundaries of named languages, and then present examples of how translanguaging can be implemented in medical education in order to sustainably enhance equity-minded patientaccessible medical communication. Keywords Medical communication skills · Medical Spanish · Medical humanities · Translanguaging · Bilingualism
Introduction Expressing health-related concepts in ways that transcend or disregard normative language boundaries is common in multilingual, multicultural environments. Take, for example, Spanish-speaking United States (U.S.) patients who may use what are typically perceived as ‘English technical terms’ that have acquired popular usage in the community, such as /em-ar-ái/ for MRI, or /re-fíl/ for medication refill. Relatedly, when giving instructions in Spanish regarding not drinking from a straw when recovering from a tonsillectomy, the doctor may expla
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