Literacy and Communication Issues and Concerns for Nursing Students from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds (NESB)

Literacy and Communication Issues and Concerns for Nursing Students from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds (NESB)

Nursing graduates require good proficiency in English with the capacity to comprehend, reason and communicate using difficult and high level vocabulary and conceptual understanding. They need to be able to engage in conversations, reporting, and recording information clearly and succinctly with other nurses, academic staff, peers, patients. They are required to have an IELTS 7, or the equivalent, in order to become Registered Nurses in Australia. Anecdotally, students, academic staff, and library and learning support staff have all indicated that many Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) nursing students struggle to understand the lectures, the readings, and the assessments, and therefore need bridging support in order to be successful in their studies. It has also been highlighted that first-year nursing students, especially those from NESB, use a disproportionate percentage of the learning resources provided by the university. While a number of strategies had been proposed to improve student outcomes, the issues and concerns had not been clearly defined.

In this small mixed methodology study, NESB nursing students and graduates, academic staff, and library and learning support staff were surveyed and/or interviewed and/or participated in focus groups to elicit their perspectives on unmet literacy and communication needs. USQ institutional data were reviewed to determine pathways into the nursing program for NESB students, and key performance indicators (pass rates, retention, succession, GPA and time to graduation) for students who were identified as NESB. The outcomes were compared to overall student outcomes in the program. Additionally, library and student support data were examined in detail to determine percentage use by NESB nursing students. This institutional data provided a baseline to evaluate program and university initiatives that will be introduced based on recommendations from this project.