Cultivation Of Bicultural Competence In Nursing Students At Vocational Colleges

Bicultural competence consists of two aspects. One is the competence to understand the customs and cognitive manners of the target culture and transfer information and emotions in proper ways flexibly and effectively in the universal language, generally speaking in English; the other one is the competence to deeply understand the native culture and explain and transfer the native culture in the universal language.Since of the impact of globalization on health care, there is a greater demand for nurses and a higher demand for nursing quality in the world. Nurses, whether working at home or getting a job abroad, not only need to have solid professional nursing skills but need to be equipped with good cultural competence. To nurses, bicultural competence means that draw on both Chinese culture and Western cultures especially nursing culture and combine their nursing knowledge with the particularly cultural context to better serve the patients. Nurses should improve their bicultural competence and enhance their cultural understandings of both Western cultures and Chinese culture.Referring to enhancing bicultural competence, English teaching plays an important part. However, it is easy to find out the researches on cross-cultural teaching in ELT; but, it is difficult to find out specific and systematic suggestions on it for English teaching at vocational colleges.This thesis takes the English teaching of nursing major in Hubei College of Chinese Medicine as an example. The purpose of it is to explore the way to improve nursing students’ bicultural competence at vocational colleges. It proposes the integrated mode that integrates nursing culture teaching into English teaching. To get the overall view of English teaching related to culture, the questionnaires are given to66nursing students and10English teachers from the perspectives of cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, cultural sources and teaching approaches, and a test is given as well to get an overall view of their cultural competence. Thus, the problems are found by analyzing the results such as separating culture from English teaching, overweight of English culture and overlook Chinese culture, discrepancy between teaching ideas and teaching plans and so on. These also reflect the underlying problems, that is, disproportion among culture, communication and language, insufficient cultural awareness and misplacement of the teaching of Chinese culture.This thesis proposes the integrated mode of English teaching and nursing culture teaching in view of the professional features of nursing major in vocational colleges. It incorporates the fruits of the researches on intercultural communication, cultural diversity and nursing and also adopts the theory of communication between cultures proposed by Larry A. Samovar, Richard E. Porter and Lisa A. Stefani. The guiding principles of the mode are based on the following three aspects:firstly, language, communication and culture should be views as a trinity; secondly, students should interact between culture and communication; thirdly, English teaching should be viewed as an important gateway to cultivate students’ bicultural competence.This thesis, under the frame of the integrated mode, provides suggestions on the English teaching related to culture including specifications of teaching aims, detailization of teaching plans, colourfulization of teaching contents, rationalization of teaching links and reformation of teaching evaluations. To verify the feasibility and practicality of the integrated mode, takes a term experiment of English teaching related to culture in Nursing Class1, Grade2012at Hubei College of Chinese Medicine. At the end of the term, the results of cultural assessments and cultural test suggest that students have made some progress in bicultural competence in verticality; and the results of final-term English test suggest students have made some advance in English in horizontality.The thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter One is the introduction. The research background and organization of this thesis is presented.Chapter Two is the overall review on related researches, including related research on culture teaching, bicultural competence and cultivation in cultural ability.Chapter Three is the survey on English teaching related to culture. Taking English teaching of nursing students in Hubei College of Chinese Medicine as an example, the questionnaires and a test are designed for certain students and teacher. Through analyzing the collected data, conduce the problems in English teaching related to culture.Chapter Four is the integrated teaching mode proposed in view of the professional features of nursing major in vocational colleges. And the experiment is taken. At the end of term, the results of cultural assessments and cultural test suggest that students have made some progress in bicultural competence in verticality; and the results of final-term English test suggest that students have made some advance in English in horizontality. The last chapter is the conclusion consisting three parts namely contributions of study, limitations of study and prospects for the future study.