ESL
Posted By: MNMT on 2008-01-07
In Reply to: ESLs -- How do they understand - Blondee
Many people can understand a secondary language just fine, but putting it together to speak is a different skill entirely, so I'm pretty sure that they can almost always understand their patients just fine. Try to think back to your high school foreign language classes, and remember how much more difficult it was to answer the questions than to hear what they were. Anyone learning a language can tell you that hearing and understanding or reading and understanding comes first. Nearly all of my ESL doctors not only practice here, but were trained in American colleges and hospitals, so their understanding has to be quite high. The syntax and structure differences are usually the most difficult for them, and that is why we are trained professionals in language skills. I find that many of my "worst" ESL doctors are trying much harder to be understood than many of the non-ESL docs, and I love them for that. I honestly have much more trouble with many American southern dialects than with my French, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese dictators, because there are turns of phrase and changes in elisions that baffle me entirely.
I think that we live in a very small world, and to expect that everyone we work with be a native English speaker is to deny our place within a worldwide highly mobile society. This isn't an easy job, but I still find it very rewarding when I work out the difficult doctors, and it is a lot easier when I remember they are not trying to be difficult to understand, they just need help. javascript:editor_insertHTML('text',' ');
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