Oral communication barriers facing Arab medical students

Abstract

Effective oral communication skills are critical to progress and success in academic and health care environments. As it happens, medical students at the College of Health Sciences in Umm Al Qura University in Saudi Arabia are required to perform various academic oral literacy tasks as preliminary requirement of medical curricula. These tasks include task-based learning/problem-based learning (TBL/PBL) sessions, classroom interaction, group/team work, delivering poster presentations and oral presentations. In order to navigate through these tasks successfully, they heavily depend on their ability to communicate their intended meaning-an opportunity for them to exhibit their proficiency at such tasks. Unfortunately, as these students engage in oral interactions their communication ability and progress in getting through such tasks are hindered by various barriers. This study takes a holistic view of understanding the oral communication barriers facing Arab medical students during their performance in the oral literacy tasks. Four colleges from the College of Health Sciences were chosen as targets for this study. The study adopted a qualitative research design where interviews were used a major tool to collect data from eight current medical students and eight content area professors. Findings reveal that medical students are required to spend significant amounts of time interacting orally with each other as well as with the content area professors during these tasks. It might be argued that success or failure in such tasks depends on the tacit assumption of having good oral communication skills and communicative competence. The students were found to be facing different types of barriers; both Internal and External. The majority of the students were found to have positive attitudes towards the status, prestige and instrumental significance of oral communication skills. However, around one fourth of the students were found to think of English as an alien language and disregarded its instrumental significance.