Lääkärin työtilanteiden kielellisen vaativuuden määrittäminen
Keywords:
criteria, Finnish as a second language, language demand, physician, professional language skills, work situationsAbstract
In professional language education and testing there is a need for more precise knowledge of the factors that enhance or hinder non-native worker’s linguistic perfor-mance at work. Nowadays it is common to see language skills as situational, but the concept of situation lacks proper definition and there is no proper analysis of the prop-erties of situations. The aim of this article is to use co-workers’ interviews (n = 32) to determine the linguistic demand of physician’s work situations. With the help of the-matic content analysis, I searched for factors that have an impact on immigrant physi-cians’ linguistic performance. The factors concern for example consequences and par-ticipants of situations. Based on the factors, I formulated nine criteria that determine the linguistic demand of physician’s work situations: criticalness, social responsibility, shared encyclopedic knowledge, social variation, social familiarity, rareness, urgency, language dependency, and distraction. These criteria aim to improve alignment of professional language education and testing with the actual language demands of the work place. Criteria are abstracted form the data so that they are applicable to other professions as well. On the other hand, data from other professions may yield addi-tional criteria.
