Language Learning for Healthcare Professionals
Healthcare professionals like physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, dentists, etc. use their language and communication skills as a central tool in their profession. However, professionals that immigrate to a new country often face problems when meeting patients in their new home country, where they need to communicate in a new language. They also face challenges in understanding new cultural aspects of both the language and their profession. Further on, healthcare professionals not only need to be well understood by the patient, but also be able to understand and grasp very subtle parts of an illness history discussion with sometimes worried, sick and/or mentally affected patients (Berbyuk, Allwood, & Edebäck, 2005). It has also been found that healthcare professionals that have been trained in a new language often still cannot master to communicate with their patients (Burbano-O’Leary, Federico, & Hampers, 2003). This fact indicates the importance of that the professionals have good communication skills not only in everyday language, but also in healthcare specific terms and expressions. Additionally, learning to accurately interpret non-verbal behaviors in patients and conversely to exhibit appropriate behaviors is necessary to achieve efficient interpersonal communication (Hall, Roter, & Katz, 1988; Roter & Hall, 1989). Further, learning health communication in a new language and a new cultural context is even more challenging for adult learners and might require targeted individual training (Brown, Crawford, & Carter, 2006). During the recent years, computer-assisted learning tools have also been introduced for language learning (Lamy, 2012; Loucky & JoGakuin, 2012), some of them featuring so called pedagogical agents or virtual tutors to assist the learner (Hong, Chen, & Lan, 2012; Morton & Jack, 2005). Recently, there have been a number of studies published concerning also using virtual scenarios and/or virtual characters, where the learner might interact with, and “talk to” a virtual person to train language and communication skills (Johnson et al., 2004; Morton, Gunson, & Jack, 2012; Wauters et al., 2012). However, there seem to be few reports on the use of virtual characters to train healthcare communication skills using virtual cases or characters.