Upgrading Nursing Students’ Foreign Language and Communication Skills: A Qualitative Inquiry of the Afterschool Enhancement Programmes

Abstract

Learning a foreign language is not easy for many students, particularly for nursing students who need to complete their internships in the hospital. However, motivation always drives them to the foreign language classrooms. The purpose of this study was to understand the motivations and reasons behind why these nursing students decided to study Mandarin Chinese as part of their personal development and enhancement beyond the curriculum. One main question and one sub-research question were written, why would nursing students decide to take Chinese as the tool for foreign language and culture development? What and why are the reasons and motivations for nursing students to take Chinese beyond their curriculum? The qualitative case study method was employed in order to investigate 36 nursing university students in the United Kingdom. The results of this study concluded that nursing students tend to study Chinese due to personal development and career goals. School leaders, department heads, government leaders, policymakers, human resources professionals, vocational trainers, and researchers may take this study as the opportunity to reform their current human resource and education plans to offer foreign language courses to university students, members of the public, learners, and interested parties for both personal development and career enhancements.

Development and Validation of Clinical Nursing Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale and Investigation of Self-Efficacy among Clinical Nursing Teachers

“…The literature indicated that the personality traits and characteristics of CNTs have a profound impact on the clinical experiences of students [17,19]. In this category, teachers showed greater confidence in communication skills and interpersonal relationships, which was consistent with previous studies showing that the ability to develop interpersonal relationships is the most valued skill by clinical teachers [12,16,25]. Certain items such as empathy, open-mindedness and enthusiasm are also consistent with Collier (2018) who identified approachability as the most important personality trait of clinical teachers [15].…”

“…In addition, Hou et al (2011) [21] developed a clinical nursing faculty competence inventory (CNFCI) that indicated the competencies of clinical nursing faculty, including leadership ability, problem-solving ability, educational intelligence, general teaching ability, and clinical nursing skills. The difference between our CNT-SES and these two inventories was that we have added contemporary applicable items, focus on the future development trends of the nursing profession; apply modern education technology and innovative teaching methods [30], pay attention to the development of nursing science, proficiency and ability in nursing research, participating in interdisciplinary research projects and interdisciplinary learning [31], presentation at international conferences, international foreign language ability [25], decision-making [32] and evidence-based nursing [33]. Finally, we develop the "CNT-SES" consisting of 35 items.…”

“…Furthermore, the internationalization of nurses continues to be a common phenomenon today. With the globalization and collaboration of educational programs, increased mobility requires nurses to have a foreign language ability and good language skills to communicate with patients and nurses from other countries [25].…”