Saturday 6 May 2017


Research Seminars in TESOL and Language Studies
The University of Sydney TESOL Research Network
The NurD Project: Documenting and teaching the genre of ‘receiving/admission notes’

Ahmar Mahboob and Educational Linguistics students (LNGS 7102)

The University of Sydney

Date: Monday 15th May 2017

Time: 17.00 – 19.00 pm

Venue: Education 323, The University of Sydney

The presentation will introduce the NurD (Nursing Documentation) Project, a five month long intervention designed to support nursing students’ English language and literacy needs at a private English-medium nursing school in Pakistan. The nursing students enrolled in this program come from a diverse range of language backgrounds and have varying levels of English language proficiency. The minimum English language requirement for admission into this program is B1 (CEFR) and many of the current students meet only this minimal requirement. The goal of the NurD Project was therefore to help nursing students draft concise and precise ‘receiving/admission notes’ using genre appropriate language. ‘Receiving/admission notes’ are one type of nursing documentation where nurses are expected to write open notes based on their interaction with and observation of a patient. These notes are legal documents and are crucial in handover of cases between nurses (and doctors). Current research suggests that between 25-40% of hospital errors can be attributed to problems in handover. Thus, understanding how ‘receiving/admission notes’ are written and developing an effective pedagogic approach for teaching how to write these is of critical importance to nursing schools, nurses, doctors, patients, hospitals, and indeed the rest of the community. In this presentation, after providing a broad overview of the NurD Project, we will focus on the material development aspect of the project and discuss why, how and what material we designed for this project.