The health care professional as intercultural speaker

Abstract

This chapter considers points of contact and departure between intercultural language education and cross-cultural competence training in medicine. Educators in the fields of language education and medical communication have developed frameworks of intercultural competence that characterize the knowledge, attitudes, and skills that learners can draw on. While competence-based frameworks can guide curricula and audit programs, we argue that a language pedagogy also requires a process-oriented approach, a method of teaching and learning that sees the learner as a situated individual and an increasingly skilled practitioner. Medical students have the opportunity to become active and reflective practitioners in two complementary contexts: problem-based learning and the medical humanities. Additionally, medical students studying in a second or other language have the opportunity to use a variety of resources to explore how language is used in a wide range of health care contexts. Exploration of “authentic” instances of intercultural language encounters as well as online corpora of general and specific English provide an evidence base for the use of language in professional contexts and convey the everyday experience of being a patient, a caregiver, or an advocate.