Health services management graduate employability skills : perceptions of employers and graduates

There is no specific profile in the literature of skill requirements for health services management (HSM). However, to develop competent health service managers firstly their skill requirements must be identified. This thesis used an inclusive definition of employability skills (ES) from the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education Science and Training (DEST, 2002, p. 143)1, where ES encompass skills “not only to gain employment, but also to progress within an enterprise.” This covers technical or discipline specific skills, knowledge, capabilities and personal attributes. More recently, the Australian Employability Skills Framework (2012)2 acknowledges ES as skills and knowledge that enable employees to perform effectively in the workforce and apply technical or discipline specific skills. This document further recognises the contextual nature of ES, suggesting that ES profiles will vary for particular jobs. Hence the importance of developing a profile of ES for HSM. Findings can be used in curriculum development, by careers advisors and by employers for ongoing professional development. The aim of this thesis was to make HSM requirements more visible. To this end the study aimed to identify ES required to work in the field from the perspective of three data sources. The essential skills contained in advertisements for graduate HSM positions were used in this triangulation design. An integrative review of empirical studies using content analysis of job vacancy advertisements, was undertaken and published. Findings were used to inform development of analysis of vacancy advertisements for 100 graduate HSM positions in two major NSW newspapers and on two employment websites. Then findings from this publication were used in the development of surveys of the perceptions of senior health managers and recent graduates working in the field. A total of 38 senior managers and 42 recent graduates participated in email surveys, identified through a NSW metropolitan university placement data base. The surveys were designed to permit comparisons. ES important to managers were revealed and they also rated skill levels observed in graduates they supervised, using a five point Likert scale on ES 44 items. The same scale was used by recent graduates, rating importance of ES and their own skill levels. The findings from these three data sources are presented as a series of published papers in the thesis, including a publication in press that compares the perceptions of the two groups. After communication skills, the advertisement revealed a unique finding that experience and understanding of the health field, then teamwork and tertiary qualifications were the most important ES required to work in HSM. Tertiary qualifications and job or discipline specific skills were not enough to gain an interview or secure a job. This has implications for work integrated learning in HSM courses. The surveys revealed strong agreement between senior managers and graduates on important ES. Again, the most important ES were generic, but integrity and ethical conduct trumped communication skills (written, verbal and interpersonal), as the most important ES, followed by teamwork, and being flexible and open-minded. For rating of skill levels, agreement was not found, with recent graduates’ self-ratings higher than ratings given by senior managers. Specific skill gaps were revealed in this comparison, many of which recent graduates did not appear to recognise. Findings suggest that HEIs are not developing the ES in HSM graduates that employers require. Priorities for development were identified. From the synthesis of findings, a new model of staged ES for HSM emerged as a new way of identifying skill requirements. The stages were gaining an interview meaning that graduates were short listed for a position, to securing a job, performing a HSM job, and progressing in the job. An inclusive definition of ES and using a triangulation design, including the seldom used approach of advertisement analysis was found to be valuable. In addition, the contextual nature of HSM was confirmed, reflecting different and overlapping ES requirements as the employment process progressed. Context may well explain discrepancies in findings about ES for many professions in the past

Speech development: toddlers don't mind getting it wrong.

A recent study has found that toddlers do not compensate for an artificial alteration in a vowel they hear themselves producing. This raises questions about how young children learn speech sounds

Learning to Pronounce First Words in Three Languages: An Investigation of Caregiver and Infant Behavior Using a Computational Model of an Infant

Words are made up of speech sounds. Almost all accounts of child speech development assume that children learn the pronunciation of first language (L1) speech sounds by imitation, most claiming that the child performs some kind of auditory matching to the elements of ambient speech. However, there is evidence to support an alternative account and we investigate the non-imitative child behavior and well-attested caregiver behavior that this account posits using Elija, a computational model of an infant. Through unsupervised active learning, Elija began by discovering motor patterns, which produced sounds. In separate interaction experiments, native speakers of English, French and German then played the role of his caregiver. In their first interactions with Elija, they were allowed to respond to his sounds if they felt this was natural. We analyzed the interactions through phonemic transcriptions of the caregivers' utterances and found that they interpreted his output within the framework of their native languages. Their form of response was almost always a reformulation of Elija's utterance into well-formed sounds of L1. Elija retained those motor patterns to which a caregiver responded and formed associations between his motor pattern and the response it provoked. Thus in a second phase of interaction, he was able to parse input utterances in terms of the caregiver responses he had heard previously, and respond using his associated motor patterns. This capacity enabled the caregivers to teach Elija to pronounce some simple words in their native languages, by his serial imitation of the words' component speech sounds. Overall, our results demonstrate that the natural responses and behaviors of human subjects to infant-like vocalizations can take a computational model from a biologically plausible initial state through to word pronunciation. This provides support for an alternative to current auditory matching hypotheses for how children learn to pronounce

Creating the cognitive form of phonological units: The speech sound correspondence problem in infancy could be solved by mirrored vocal interactions rather than by imitation

Theories about the cognitive nature of phonological units have been constrained by the assumption that young children solve the correspondence problem for speech sounds by imitation, whether by an auditory- or gesture-based matching to target process. Imitation on the part of the child implies that he makes a comparison within one of these domains, which is presumed to be the modality of the underlying representation of speech sounds. However, there is no evidence that the correspondence problem is solved in this way. Instead we argue that the child can solve it through the mirroring behaviour of his caregivers within imitative interactions and that this mechanism is more consistent with the developmental data. The underlying representation formed by mirroring is intrinsically perceptuo-motor. It is created by the association of a vocal action performed by the child and the reformulation of this into an L1 speech token that he hears in return. Our account of how production and perception develop incorporating this mechanism explains some longstanding problems in speech and reconciles data from psychology and neuroscience

Modeling the development of pronunciation in infant speech acquisition.

Pronunciation is an important part of speech acquisition, but little attention has been given to the mechanism or mechanisms by which it develops. Speech sound qualities, for example, have just been assumed to develop by simple imitation. In most accounts this is then assumed to be by acoustic matching, with the infant comparing his output to that of his caregiver. There are theoretical and empirical problems with both of these assumptions, and we present a computational model- Elija-that does not learn to pronounce speech sounds this way. Elija starts by exploring the sound making capabilities of his vocal apparatus. Then he uses the natural responses he gets from a caregiver to learn equivalence relations between his vocal actions and his caregiver's speech. We show that Elija progresses from a babbling stage to learning the names of objects. This demonstrates the viability of a non-imitative mechanism in learning to pronounce

Teaching the pronunciation of sentence final and word boundary stops to French learners of English: distracted imitation versus audio-visual explanations.

Studies on stop unrelease in second language acquisition have hitherto focused on the productions of Slavic learners of English (Šimáčková & Podlipský, 2015) and experiments on Polish learners of English; the latter show the tendency to release stops on a more regular basis depending on the type of stop combinations (Rojczyk et al. 2013). In the present study, we aim to test the efficiency of audio-visual explanations as opposed to distracted imitation in pronunciation teaching amongst French learners of English. While unreleased stops are rather frequent in French and English - especially in plosives clusters (Byrd, 1993; Davidson, 2010), unreleased plosives in final positions are less common in French (Van Dommelen, 1983). During phase 1 of the experiment, three groups of 12 native French learners of English (level A1/A2, B1/B2 and C1/C2) were asked to read idiomatic expressions containing both homogeneous and heterogeneous sequences of voiceless stops straddled between words, namely, in sequences like “that cat” [ðæt˺ kæt˺], and stops at the end of sentences like “I told him to speak” [tə spiːk˺]. In the second phase of the experiment, one half in each group was given a different task. The first group heard recorded versions of phase 1 sentences and before reading them out loud, counted up to five in their L1. Stimuli for imitation contained no release in the contexts under scrutiny. The other half had to watch a video explaining the phenomenon of unreleased stops with a production of phase-two expressions propped up by hand gestures. They were then asked to re-read the sentences given in phase 1. Based on these results the current study makes recommendations about what working environment should be prioritized in pronunciation teaching both in class and online (Kröger et al. 2010), and suggests ways to assess students and visually keep track of their progress

The role of imitation in learning to pronounce.

Timing patterns and the qualities of speech sounds are two important aspects of pronunciation. It is generally believed that imitation from adult models is the mechanism by which a child replicates them. However, this account is unsatisfactory, both for theoretical reasons and because it leaves the developmental data difficult to explain. I describe two alternative mechanisms. The first explains some timing patterns (vowel length changes, 'rhythm', etc.) as emerging because a child's production apparatus is small, immature and still being trained. As a result, both the aerodynamics of his speech and his style of speech breathing differ markedly from the adult model. Under their constraints the child modifies his segmental output in various ways which have effects on speech timing but these effects are epiphenomenal rather than the result of being modelled directly. The second mechanism accounts for how children learn to pronounce speech sounds. The common, but actually problematic, assumption is that a child does this by judging the similarity between his own and others' output, and adjusting his production accordingly. Instead, I propose a role for the typical vocal interaction of early childhood where a mother reformulates ('imitates') her child's output, reflecting back the linguistic intentions she imputes to him. From this expert, adult judgment of either similarity or functional equivalence, the child can determine correspondences between his production and adult output. This learning process is more complex than simple imitation but generates the most natural of forms for the underlying representation of speech sounds. As a result, some longstanding problems in speech can be resolved and an integrated developmental account of production and perception emerges. Pronunciation is generally taught on the basis that imitation is the natural mechanism for its acquisition. If this is incorrect, then alternative methods should give better results than achieved at present

Modeling motor pattern generation in the development of infant speech production

We previously proposed a non-imitative account of learning to pronounce, implemented computationally using discovery and mirrored interaction with a caregiver. Our model used an infant vocal tract synthesizer and its articulators were driven by a simple motor system. During an initial phase, motor patterns develop that represent potentially useful speech sounds. To increase the realism of this model we now include some of the constraints imposed by speech breathing. We also implement a more sophisticated motor system. Firstly, this can independently control articulator movement over different timescales, which is necessary to effectively control respiration as well as prosody. Secondly, we implement a two-tier hierarchical representation of motor patterns so that more complex patterns can be built up from simpler sub-units. We show that our model can learn different onset times and durations for articulator movements and synchronize its respiratory cycle with utterance production. Finally we show that the model can pronounce utterances composed of sequences of speech sounds

Smoothie or Fruit Salad? Learners’ Descriptions of Accents as Windows to Concept Formation

This paper explores the linguistically naive descriptions which one set of EFL learners provided when identifying and describing accents. First and second-year English majors at a French university were asked to do two tasks. First, they listened to two extracts to determine whether the speaker’s accent sounded more British or American, and to explain which features helped them to decide. Later they answered two questions: a) What do you do when you want to sound more like an American? and b) more like a British person? The analysis of their answers highlights learners’ underlying representations of accents as well as concept formation in relation to English pronunciation. I argue that this cognitive aspect of L2 learning should be addressed explicitly in instruction