Keeping up with the nurses : on-the-job language coaching of health care professionals of immigrant background

Abstract

Language skills are of crucial importance for the immigrants. When employed, however, there are often little opportunities to learn the occupational language more in depth. This article focuses on changes that take place when professional language and communication training is implemented by individual coaching on the job instead of formal training in a classroom. The scene of the changes is a pilot training of a project called Career path.

Coaching was selected as the method of the training due to four principles that differ from traditional frontal teaching: the focus is on individuality, professional development, involvement of the work community and flexibility of the implementation. This is to say that the primus motor of the training is the nurse – she or he has the ownership of learning.

The article discusses the experiences of implementing the principles above. The paper also presents some of the feedback of the participants of the pilot.