Cultural racism, language prejudice and discrimination in hospital contexts : an Australian study

This article explores the idea that racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare may be expressive of unacknowledged practices of cultural racism. In conducting this exploration, the researchers identify, describe and discuss the practice of language prejudice and discrimination by health service providers, discovered serendipitously in the context of a broader study exploring cultural safety and cultural competency in an Australian healthcare context. The original study involved individual and focus groups interviews with 145 participants recruited from over 17 different organisational and domestic home sites. Participants included health service managers, ethnic liaison officers, qualified health interpreters, cultural trainers/educators, ethnic welfare organisation staff, registered nurses, allied health professionals, and healthcare consumers. Participants self-identified as being from over 27 different ethnocultural and language backgrounds.

Analysis of the data revealed that English language proficiency, like skin colour, was used as a social marker to classify, categorise, and negatively evaluate people of non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) in the contexts studied. Negative evaluations, in turn, were used to justify the exclusion of NESB people from healthcare relationships and resources. Further data analysis revealed that underpinning the negative attitudes and behaviours in hospital domains concerning people who spoke accented English or who did not speak English proficiently were a dislike of difference, fear of difference, intolerance of difference, fear of competition for scarce healthcare resources, repressed hostility toward difference, and ignorance.

Highlighting the implications of language prejudice for the safety and quality care of NESB people, the researchers call for further internationally comparative research and debate on the subject.

English language reform and the process of democratic change

Malaysian society has and is undergoing considerable social, political, economic and educational change. Scholars point to the forces of globalization and the needs to be able to meet the challenges of globalization as the central driver of language policy. Commentators, academics and many in the general public have focused on the need for Malaysia to adapt to globalization and the importance of English to this process given the needs and characteristic of the knowledge economy. However, there appears to be less recognition of the way such a change in Malaysian language policy needs to be engaged in a dynamically shifting knowledge society and developing public sphere. Language is a social act and the debate over language and its place and role in society is therefore a debate over the nature and quality of social interaction. Debate over language is thus inherently political. Due to the growth and development of an interactive and engaged public sphere and knowledge society in Malaysia, there is a need to approach to the idea of engaging English that grasps the plurality and complexity of its role in the world. The political approach to engaging English in Malaysia needs to engage democratic deliberation in a society that is increasingly fragmented but also showing signs of developing an active public sphere not beholden to top down authority. Disagreement over language and the way the debate is theorized hides from view the possibility of points of consensus on the issue of English language and Malaysian education. Establishing overlapping consensus through public deliberation and consultation is a necessary precondition to effective language policy in contemporary Malaysia. Failure to understand this only leads to policy paralysis.

Language, power and ruling relations in vocational education and training

This thesis uses institutional ethnography to explore the text-based regulatory framework of the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. Training Packages are national competency standards used to assess local workplace practice. The Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF) is a national compliance framework used to audit local learning and assessment practice. These texts operate in a ‘symbiotic relationship’ to achieve a policy goal of national consistency. The researcher explicates the social relations of VET starting from her disquiet as a practitioner. The thesis argues that Training Packages and the AQTF socially organise the content and delivery of local learning and assessment activities. VET practitioners struggle to use these texts to support good practice, and their hidden work maintains an unstable VET system. Yet the extralocal mode of ruling offers no room to challenge VET policy. The thesis explicates three themes. Interview data is used to explore the contrast between the institutional language of Training Packages and the vernacular of workplaces in which these texts are activated. Many practitioners and participants simply do not understand Training Package competency standards. Using these texts to judge employee performance shifts the policing of workplace practice from local sites to external VET authorities. A second theme emerges as the analysis explores why VET practitioners use this excluding language in their work with participants. Interview data reveals that local training organisations achieve different readings as they engage with ruling VET texts. Some organisations use the national texts as broad frameworks, allowing practitioners to create spaces for meaningful learning. Other organisations adopt a narrow and rule-bound reading of national texts, displacing practitioners’ authority over their own practice. A third theme is explored through examination of a sequence of VET texts. The review and redevelopment of the mandatory qualifications for VET practitioners identified the language of the competency standards as a significant accessibility issue. These concerns were reshaped and subsumed in an official response that established the use of this language as a compulsory assessable requirement and a language and literacy benchmark. The thesis presents a new understanding of VET as a regulatory framework established through multiple levels of ruling texts that connect local sites to national government agendas. While some individual practitioners are able to navigate through this system, there is an urgent need for practitioners as a profession to challenge national hegemony.

Language, technology and the law : anti-plagiarism software and students' academic writing

Plagiarism is of grave concern for academic institutions in the twenty-first
century. Institutions utilise plagiarism policies, honour codes and regulations to ensure students develop a sense of educational integrity. Technology has recently afforded new methods for staff to detect plagiarism – through antiplagiarism software. This paper explores perspectives of seven teachers across five faculties to Turnitin.com (an anti-plagiarism software package) at a large Australian university. The findings indicate that software such as Turnitin.com may assist in the quest to detect text-matching, and perhaps reduce plagiarism. It should not, however, be considered the panacea for plagiarism. Plagiarism policies should also reflect cognisance of the existence of a 'plagiarism continuum' (Sutherland-Smith, 2003) through the use of technology. This research highlights the broader need for institutions to reformulate plagiarism policies in light of cross-cultural perspectives of authorship and attribution of text.

Language, experience and professional learning (what Walter Benjamin can teach us)

This essay raises questions about how language educators might construct and further develop their epistemology of practice in and through the situations in which they work from day to day. The occasion for this paper is our work as guest editors of a special issue of L-1: Educational Studies in Language and Literature, when we invited L1 teachers to reflect on the role that language plays in their professional learning, whether it be in the form of conversations with peers, reflective writing, or by other means. We begin this essay by locating our reflections within our current policy context, namely the standards-based reforms that have come to dominate educational thinking around the world, offering a brief critique of the values and attitudes embedded within them. We then outline a philosophical framework as an alternative to the world-view reflected by such reforms, focusing specifically on the work of Walter Benjamin. In the final sections, we review our work as guest editors of the special issue of L-1, reflecting on what we have learned from the papers we have assembled for this issue, and locating our learning within the philosophical framework that we have drawn from Benjamin. We argue that it is timely for language educators to articulate the assumptions that inhere within their work, in contradistinction to the common sense embedded in standards. Thus we might begin to reconceptualise the relation between language, experience and professional learning in opposition to the hegemony of standards.

Assessing health literacy : a new domain for collaboration between language testers and health professionals

Health literacy, defined as an individual's capacity to process health information in order to make appropriate health decisions, is the focus of increasing attention in medical fields due to growing awareness that suboptimal health literacy is associated with poorer health outcomes. To explore this issue, a number of instruments, reported to have high internal consistency and strong correlations with general literacy tests, have been developed. However, their validity as measures of the target construct is seldom explored using multiple sources of evidence. The current study, involving collaboration between health professionals and language specialists, set out to assess the validity of the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM), which describes itself as a “reading recognition” test that measures ability to pronounce common medical and lay terms. Drawing on a sample of 310 respondents, including both native and non-native speakers of English, investigations were undertaken to probe the REALM's validity as a measure of understanding the selected terms and to consider associations between scores on this widely used test and those derived from other recognized health literacy tests. Results suggest that the REALM is underrepresenting the health literacy construct and that the test may also be biased against non-native speakers of English. The study points to an expanded role for language testers, working in collaboration with experts from medical disciplines, in developing and evaluating health literacy tools.

Language, culture and health

This chapter provides an overview of the impact language and culture background can have on individuals' experience of illness and conceptualization of health. it also discusses cultural competency for health care personnel in the onctext of increasing diverse communities with specific reference to Australia and New Zealand.

The inescapability of language : theory and practice for L-1 educators

Editorial introducing a range fo papers addressing issue of research methodologies and philosphical frameworks for research in L-1 education.