Skill by doctor or patient? Comprehensibility of speech of physicians with Finnish as a second language during consultation
Keywords:
comprehensibility of speech, Finnish as a second language, physicians, professional language proficiencyAbstract
The article concerns the comprehensibility of speech of physicians who use Finnish as a
second language during patient consultations. The research data consists of clinical skills
tests for the licensing process of physicians who completed their degrees outside the EEA,
i.e. video-recorded patient consultations with the total length of approximately 40 hours.
The article looks at the comprehensibility of the doctors’ speech from two perspectives.
The first part examines incidences in which the patient somehow expresses that they have
failed to understand what the doctor said. The second part of the analysis focuses on the
transfer of linguistic meanings, attempting to understand which elements of the speech
reduce comprehensibility.
The study found that the problems expressed by patients are often related to pronunciation
and morphosyntax. There are also problems, but to a lesser extent, related to vocabulary and
grammatical meanings. These problems are often local and resolved during the consultation.
The second stage of the analysis revealed more serious problems: missing vocabulary and
imprecise or incorrect grammatical meanings, preventing the message from being transferred
accurately. It was also discovered that there are great differences between patients as to how
well they understand the speech of a doctor who speaks Finnish as a second language.
