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.