Ever felt frustrated that your message isn't understood? Ever felt nervous about speaking up?

Communicating with Students (Video 2)

Transcript:

Presenter:
How do you communicate with students and how do you make sure they understand you? Let’s see what the staff have to say.

Lecturer (School of Nursing and Midwifery, QUT):
The strategies that are used are mainly pronunciation to speak slowly, clearly use correct English so that we are not using too many Australian colloquialisms or, if so, we are explaining those.

Lecturer (School of Nursing and Midwifery, QUT):
The strategies I use with international students to ensure communications are actually to make sure I get the student to repeat back to me what I’ve asked them. Also often I ask them to change it into their own words to make sure that, in fact, they’re not just parroting back to me what I’ve said. So I try and break it down to make sure they know exactly what I’m asking of them.

Lecturer (School of Nursing and Midwifery, QUT):
The use of humour is very important, maybe, because it breaks the ice and to encourage them to understand where Australian humour comes from. And we do this by a lot of demonstrations and acting out what we’re meaning.

Lecturer (School of Nursing and Midwifery, QUT):
Often students who have English as a second language may take part of what you are talking about and then miss the rest of it. So they might take the first point if you aren’t being very specific and laying it out point by point - then they often miss the rest of the content.

Lecturer (School of Nursing and Midwifery, QUT):
When we’ve given an instruction to a student it’s very important that they demonstrate their understanding, their comprehension of what’s said. So rather than just asking them to repeat back what’s being said we ask them to… follow on essentially, take a patient’s blood glucose, they must then go and get the equipment or demonstrate. Nodding their head and looking as if they’re saying yes is also something we encourage them to avoid. They must verbalise “yes they understand” or “no they don’t” and mostly encourage to keep their head still.