Teaching and Learning Reflective Writing Skills for Nursing Students Whose First Language is not English

Abstract

Teaching and Learning Reflective Writing Skills for Nursing Students Whose First Language is not English Context Reflective writing is an important skill for Health Care Professionals at any stage of their study or career. However, reflective writing rarely comes naturally, commonly comprising skills and attitudes that need to be learned, especially by students who are not writing in their native language. At HKU, reflective writing is an important component of the Nursing curriculum and students from this discipline are given specialized instruction from the Centre for Applied English Studies (CAES). Intervention In the CAES course ‘Academic Communication for Nursing Students,’ students engage in nine hours of in-class input, and three hours of online tasks on reflective writing. In addition, they also practice reflective writing. This is in the form of a 500 word diagnostic writing task at the start of the course, followed by a formal 1000 word assessment on an authentic incident they have encountered during their clinical experiences, which includes a first draft reviewed by peers and teacher. Observations Over the past five years, we have observed that the students’ writing quality has improved as we have fine-tuned our materials and approach. In particular, including authentic exemplars of medical reflections has helped tremendously with students’ understanding of the genre. This can be seen tangibly in the changes from the students’ first ‘diagnostic’ writing task to that of their final reflective writing assignment. Conclusions Many medical educators who are not writing specialists may be concerned about the quality of their students’ reflective writing but may be unsure about how to address it. We would like to share our approach and experience in teaching reflective writing. Although medical educators may not have time to cover detailed reflective writing instruction in their own syllabi, we hope we can share some useful ideas, tips and techniques to help them clarify their expectations to students.