Do Nurses Use Discourse Markers Differently when Using Their Second Language as Opposed to Their First while Interviewing Patients?

The authors examined whether discourse-marker use changes in nurse–patient interactions as a function of nurses using their first (L1) or second (L2) language. They explain that discourse markers were analyzed as turn-maintenance markers that indicate acknowledgement and discourse-shift markers that signal shifts of a topic or speaker in the conversation. These two categories differ in terms of degree of discourse management and interactional control. Sixteen nurses conducted a pain-assessment interview with a patient native speaker of English and with a patient native speaker of French, where the nurses used their own L1 in one case and their own weaker L2 in the other. The authors found that their first hypothesis, that nurses would generally use discourse markers more frequently in the L1 than in the L2, was not supported. Their second hypothesis, that nurses would use discourse-shift markers less frequently in their L2 compared to the L1, relative to the nurses' (baseline) use of turn-maintenance markers, was supported. The authors conclude that their findings, especially the support for the second hypothesis, could have implications for the development of L2 training for health practitioners.

The Canadian Modern Language Review/La revue canadienne des langues vivantes

Vol. 76

no. 2

91-113

May 2020

en