Ohjeita, tietoa ja turvaa kielen keinoin. Ulkomailta palkatut sairaanhoitajat ammatillista suomen kielen taitoaan osoittamassa

Abstract

Advice, information and safety by means of language: internationally recruited nurses demonstrating their professional Finnish language skills 

he focus of this paper is on the professional language used by four internationally educated nurses working in Finnish in Finland. The data comes from a tailor-made professional language test module including integrated material-based tasks. The module was designed by the project Health care Finnish: developing and assessing Finnish proficiency among health care professionals (2014−2015) to complement the skill profiles based on the test results of the National Certifi- cates of Language Proficiency (NCLP) intermediate level test.

None of the participants had yet reached the level B2 in Finnish, and one of them had reached level B1 in speaking comprehension only. Level B1 (level 3 in NCLP) is currently the level required for authorization in the Finnish health sector for non-EU/EEA health care professionals. However, there are official suggestions that, in the future, the requirements be raised to level B2 (level 4 in NCLP) and also cover EU/EEA educated professionals (Ministry of Education 2014). Assessment of professional language skills has also been suggested, but no decisions have been made on this yet.

The aim of the qualitative analysis of the test performance data was to find out how the participants utilize different syntactic, lexical and pragmatic resources to express communicative functions such as giving instructions and documenting information, which are typical for health communication. Also under scrutiny was their ability to shift between professional and colloquial language use.