Case 3: Multilingual classes for health professionals

In this video you will hear two specialists in health and health education talk about their experience of working with multilingual groups of students and trainees.

They focus on their own sense of linguistic inadequacy, because they cannot speak the language of their students. And they stress the need to create a space in which language can be used effectively even though imperfectly.

In this sense the language classroom becomes a negotiating space – and also an ‘unruly’ space, where the tutor has to relinquish control and let the students deal with difficulties by cooperating and offering peer translation to each other.

The need for translation and the inability of the teacher to deal with all issues via the medium of English leads to a radical change in the relationship of power within the classroom.