An investigation of the perspectives on language proficiency of teachers, learners and supervisors within Workplace English Language and Literacy classes (AMES, NSW) and teacher practices relating to spoken and written language development within these classes

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education.This research has investigated two related questions: i) the way adult English as a second language teachers, workplace supervisors and English language learners talk about language proficiency in the workplace and what their expectations of language improvement are, and ii) how teachers teach English as a second language in workplace classes, and how their practices are grounded in current or traditional language acquisition theories or language development models and therefore how they foreground some aspects of language more than others. The 'problem' in the research was to explore the extent to which second language teachers, workplace supervisors and English language learners 'spoke the same language about language'. If there were differences in perceptions about language across the groups and if teachers themselves approached language differently from each other, to what extent might their practices satisfy learners and workplace supervisors in an educational climate of increased accountability? Four workplace English language and literacy classes were observed, recorded and analysed. The conversational data in the classes was used to illustrate what teachers were saying about language, what language proficiency models their metalanguage derived from and how this related to what they had said they believed about language and language learning. Teachers beliefs about language were surveyed in a separate research questionnaire and their course reports and classroom materials were also used to establish their theoretical underpinnings. Twenty-four workplace supervisors of the learners concerned were observed and recorded during teacher/supervisor meetings or sent questionnaires to ascertain their views on the learners and what they expected in terms of language performance and improvement from the learners. Thirty one learners from the four classes were interviewed or sent questionnaires about their views of their own language proficiency. The findings of the research indicated that as a result of certain factors, including professional training, previous language education background and possibly cultural expectations, English as a second language teachers, workplace supervisors and learners did not share the same concepts, understanding and expectations of the language abilities of non-English speaking workers in the workplace. Comparisons of the four teachers' practices indicated a range of teaching approaches which were all noticeably linked to their organisational and theoretical training and incorporated aspects of several current and traditional pedagogical practices. All four teachers were able to articulate their approaches to language learning and beliefs about what are the significant components of communication which were consistently and obviously reflected in their practice. The satisfying of stakeholder needs - learners and supervisors - by teacher practices was found not to be an issue because of the complexity of the expectations as well as the group behaviour of adult learners in workplace classes. However a framework for supplementing the theoretical and practical 'biases' by teachers was proposed to close any gaps which may result from idiosyncratic approaches. Recommendations are made that teachers be assisted to understand their practice through action research, increase their theoretical knowledge in language proficiency and assessment and translate their professional expertise into an intelligible format for workplace stakeholders

Practising Knowing at Work: a case study in healthcare

In healthcare today, medical knowledge is still largely viewed by the health sector as an ‘epistemology of possession’; a perspective which gives primacy to knowledge transfer and communication aspects of care. In my view, this perspective underestimates the complexity of the social, material, situated and collective way that doctors and nurses actually work together – and do knowledge – in order to care for their patients . I illustrate this complexity based on data from a large Australian Research Council (ARC) study by closely examining a case study of how a healthcare team cares for a dying 67-year old patient, Joel in an Emergency Room (ER). Drawing on ethnographic and linguistic ethnographic methodologies and data, ‘knowledge’ is proposed, not as ‘possession’, but as an activity, ‘a collective and distributed ‘doing’ situated in time and space, and therefore taking place in [the] work practices [of the ERs nurses and doctors]. Theoretically the paper adopts a ‘practice-based’ analysis of how team knowledge is done in the ER. In adopting this approach the paper challenges conventional views on knowledge, knowledge transfer and communication in healthcare – and more broadly in other organizational contexts – alerting us to new ways of thinking about how team knowledge is done and how organizational learning might be reconceptualized

A schatzkian practice perspective of change and stability in organisations

This paper examines the coexistence of change and stability in two Australian organisations/sites: an emergency department (ED) of a hospital and a local council (Council). In these different work settings, both of which have been operating under growing market and/or demographic changes, we seek to make visible how the coexistence of change and stability contributes to learning

Communicating Quality and Safety in Health Care

As health services are becoming more complex, communication is critical to enable healthcare clinicians to provide safe and high-quality care. In response to the growing emphasis on clinicians' capacity to practise effective communication, 'Communicating Quality and Safety in Health Care' provides real-life communication scenarios and interprofessional case studies. The book engages healthcare trainees from across medicine, nursing and allied health services in a comprehensive and probing discussion of the communication demands that confront today's healthcare teams. This book explains the role of communication in mental health, emergency medicine, intensive care and a wide range of other health service and community care contexts. It emphasises the ways in which patients and clinicians communicate, and how clinicians communicate with one another. The case studies explain why and how communication is critical to good care and healing. Each chapter analyses real-life practice situations, encourages the learner to ask probing questions about these situations, and sets out the principal components and strategies of good communication. Written by prominent and internationally renowned scholars, 'Communicating Quality and Safety in Health Care' helps both learners and instructors contextualise the practical exemplars by identifying the connections to relevant accreditation and policy requirements

A brief history of communication in healthcare

This chapter provides a brief history of how communication developed within the context of healthcare provision. The chapter describes this history by referring to how the problem of human disease has been approached over time, and how this reshaped the ways we have communicated about care. We start our account at the time when care began to be institutionalised by people with increasing specialist training and with rising levels of financial and governmental support. First, then, we discuss the lead up to the emergence of Western healthcare institutions. Caring for the sick was common throughout the ages, of course, with different cultures developing their own unique ways of caring for the unwell (Porter, 1999). For centuries, religious orders had specialised wards attached to monasteries where male nurses specialised in looking after the diseased. The Middle Ages saw the rise of charitable guesthouses and alms houses where people suffering from a wide variety of afflictions were admitted and nursed (Risse, 1999). These early nursing practices were gradually complemented with medical approaches to disease treatment. Medicine emerged during the Renaissance from a fusion of two different fields. One was the practice of dissecting corpses, already evident in Greek times, and then only intermittently allowed under later Christian regimes. The other was the practice of drug administration, combining sophisticated folk knowledge of herbal treatments with pharmacological experimentation and clinical observation

Introduction: communicating for quality and safety

In this introductory chapter, we talk about why communication is so important in health care. Indeed, we believe that communication is central to safe and good quality health care. We know that for many people communication is something we do naturally. It is taken as given, and not considered worthy of very much attention. People may also think there are more urgent things to worry about, such as technical precision, clinical knowledge and professional skills. Communication has been defined in different ways. A recent NHS document defines communication in these terms: Communication is a process that involves a meaningful exchange between at least two people to convey facts, needs, opinions, thoughts, feelings or other information through both verbal and non-verbal means, including face-to-face exchanges and the written word. (National Health Service, 2010) The above definition of communication suggests that communication takes place face-to-face, non-verbally and in writing. We know, however, that communication also increasingly relies on information and communication technologies (ICTs). ICTs harness all kinds of visual and numerical information, as well as language

An enterprising phoenix: materiality, affect and learning

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how workers experience planned and unplanned change(s), how the effects of change endure in organizations and the entanglement (Gherardi, 2015) of materiality, affect and learning. Design/methodology/approach: Research design is ethnographic in nature and draws from 30 semi-structured interviews of workers in an Australian organization. Interviews were designed to elicit narrative accounts (stories) of challenges and change faced by the workers. Desktop research of organizational documents and material artefacts complemented interview data. Analysis is informed by socio-material understandings and, in particular, the ideas of materiality, affect and learning. Findings: Change, in the form of a fire, triggered spontaneous and surprisingly positive affectual and organizational outcomes that exceeded earlier attempts at restructuring work. In the wake of the material tragedy of the fire in one organization, what emerged was a shift in the workers and the practices of the organization. Their accounts emphasized challenges, excitement and renewal, which prompt reconsideration of learning at work, in particular the entanglement of affect, materiality and learning in times of change. Originality/value: Much workplace learning research identifies change as conducive to learning. This paper builds on this research by providing new understandings of, and insights into, the enduring effects of change

Re-organizing Australian public sector work: Conditions for innovating-in-practice SJPA 18(4)

Abstract Public sector organizations continue to re-organize in response to reform imperatives but are they more innovative when they transform to market or customer orientations? This paper examines what we call innovating-in-practice in a hospital emergency department, a local government council and a corrections centre by analyzing how work organization dualities are negotiated using a practice theory lens. In public sector work, work dualities and tensions are often created when reform initiatives are introduced, requiring existing work practices to be challenged and changed. Our empirical illustrations expose the messiness and enmeshing of various practitioner interests, relations, materialities and purposes of practice in ways that restrict or embrace innovation. Innovating-in-practice 'troubles' the structural limitations of conventional approaches to organizing or designing for innovation, suggesting in contrast, the value of more fluid processes for reinventing work that emerge from accommodating work organization dualities and interrogating the complexities of practice-based accomplishments

Communicating in hospital emergency departments

Ineffective communication has been identified as the major cause of critical incidents in public hospitals in Australia. Critical incidents are adverse events leading to avoidable patient harm. This article discusses a study that focused on spoken interactions between clinicians and patients in the emergency department of a large, public teaching hospital in New South Wales, Australia. The purpose of the study was to identify successful and unsuccessful communication encounters. It combined two complementary modes of analysis: qualitative ethnographic analysis of the social practices of emergency department healthcare and discourse analysis of the talk between clinicians and patients. This allowed the researchers to analyse how talk is socially organised around healthcare practices and how language and other factors impact on the effectiveness of communication. The complex, high stress, unpredictable and dynamic work of emergency departments constructs particular challenges for effective communication. The article analyses patient–clinician interactions within the organisational and professional practices of the emergency department and highlights some systemic and communication issues. It concludes with some implications for the professional development of clinicians and an outline of ongoing research in emergency departments.10 page(s

Patient Safety: a tri-stratal interpretation of communicative risk in the Emergency Departments of public hospitals

6 page(s