Social interactions with patients and their families as well as co-workers are part of nurses' daily work. Studies in Conversation Analysis have investigated the specific interactional practices nurses regularly accomplish in the course of their duties (see Mayor & Bietti 2016). Interacting in efficient and appropriate ways is part of a larger 'interactional competence' (IC) (see Pekarek Doehler 2019). While health professionals typically develop such competence through practice, this study aims at investigating how IC can be addressed during vocational training.
We present a study of a pedagogy based on Conversation Analysis (see Filliettaz 2018) in the context of pre-service nurses' education. At the center of the pedagogy lies the close examination of videorecorded nurse-patient(s) social interactions and their detailed transcripts during data sessions (see Stevanovic & Weiste 2017). The data sessions are facilitated by an interdisciplinary teaching team involving experts from different fields: nursing, linguistics, and sociology.
This paper focuses on a specific linguistic phenomenon: polar questions. We will examine how it emerges as a topic of interest for nursing students during a data session and how it is progressively transformed into an object of professional development. Since Heritage and colleagues' (2007), it has been acknowledged that the ways in which health professionals design their questions shape the kind of response the patient provides next, hence suggesting significant implications for praxis.
Carrying out a micro-longitudinal analysis of one data session, we will show how students move from a first intuitive non-expert understanding of question formats as they observe occurrences in the video data to a more interaction-based conceptualization of questions, and of language use more generally.
In conclusion, this Conversation-Analysis-based pedagogy shows to benefit nursing students' professional development in two ways: 1) it is efficient in raising students' awareness of the interactional workings of professional practice; 2) it is the very mean by which they develop the acute observation skills and analytic objectivity that are needed in nursing work. More generally, this paper showcases how linguists' might be productively put at the service of professional communities of practices to improve vocational training and praxis.
Bibliography
Filliettaz, L. (2018). Interactions verbales et recherche en éducation: principes, méthodes et outils d'analyse. Université de Genève: Carnets des sciences de l'éducation.
Heritage, J. Robinson, J. D., Elliot, M. N., Beckett, M. & Wilkes, M. (2007). Reducing patients' unmet concerns in primary care: the difference one word can make. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 22(10), 1429-1433.
Mayor, E. & Bietti, L. (2016). Ethnomethodological studies of nurse-patient and nurse-relative interactions: A scoping review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 70, 46-57.
Pekarek Doehler, S. (2019). On the nature and the development of L2 interactional competence: state of the art and implications for praxis. In R. Salaberry, & S. Kunitz (Eds.) Teaching and Testing L2 Interactional Competence: Bridging theory and practice (pp. 25-59). Routledge.
Stevanovic, M. & Weiste, E. (2017). Conversation-analytic data session as a pedagogical institution. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 15, 1-17.
