A Study of the English Language Learning Challenges that Inhibit Displaced Medical Professionals from Returning to Practice in the UK

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Author
Roberts, Gabriel
Date
2015Type
Thesis
Publisher
Cardiff Metropolitan University
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Show full item recordAbstract
To join the General Medical Council (GMC) refugee doctors are required to pass
professional and linguistic assessments. The first of these is the International English
Language Testing System (IELTS) test and, according to British Medical Association
statistics released in 2008, this is a major barrier to progress, impeding the progress of 45%
of refugee doctors.
Drawing on my experiences of preparing refugee doctors for the IELTS test, I became
interested in discovering what was holding them back. The students attending the daily
classes were highly intelligent, motivated individuals who had a goal of integrating into their
host country. Han (2004, pp.28-37) discusses the putative causes of stabilized language
errors, which she describes as fossilization. However, the refugee doctors in my classes did
not seem to fit into the traditional profile of a learner with these sorts of language errors.
My aim was to work with the clients from the Wales Asylum-seeking and Refugee Doctors
(WARD) group and to ask them to reflect on the stabilized language errors by means of a
questionnaire, interview and focus group. During this project, twenty-two participants were
asked about their beliefs about their stabilized language errors and asked about their
strategies to overcome them. In addition, four expert witnesses working in the field of
language testing in medicine were invited to provide further perspectives on these
challenges.
The research design foregrounded the participants’ views on their stabilized language errors
and the causal factors that may have led to them. Former clients of the WARD group were
sent a questionnaire asking them to self-assess their stabilized language errors and identify
the causal factors. At the same time, current clients of the WARD group who were training
for the IELTS test were given a diagnostic language quiz. Subsequently, they were
interviewed to find out their views on their weaker areas identified in the diagnostic language
quiz. When the results were analysed, emergent findings were presented to the
interviewees in a focus group, to give them further opportunity to comment on the possible
reasons for their stabilized language errors.
The main findings were that many of the participants who had achieved the GMC language
requirements felt that they still had some stabilized language errors. The participants that
were given the diagnostic language quiz while still training for the IELTS test did not exhibit
as many problem areas. The participants attributed the majority of their problems to ‘input’
and ‘intake’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2006) or within Han’s (2004) six domains, ‘knowledge
representation’ and ‘knowledge processing’. Initially, none of the participants felt that Han’s
‘neuro-biological’ and ‘socio-affective’ domains held them back. However, during the focus
group, it appeared that the participants reconsidered their socio-affective problems but
continued to reject the impact of any neuro-biological problems. Expert witnesses were
called upon for their opinions and they corroborated many of the points made by the
participant group. The findings identify how displaced medical healthcare professionals may
be further supported in regaining their professional identities and to contributing fully to their
host society.
Description
PhD Thesis - School of Education
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