Negotiation of meaning used in receptive skills by Bangladesh medical students

Abstract

The study explored medical students’ perspectives towards the factors that hinder the negotiation of the meaning and strategies that help them overcome the challenges of receptive activities. The researcher adopted a qualitative multiple-case study approach and used snowball sampling technique to choose a cohort of eleven students and four teachers from different public and private medical colleges. Participants were requested to give the one-to-one semi-structured interview. This study has adopted Perfetti and Adlof’s (2012) reading comprehension framework and Kramsch's (1983) framework of negotiating meaning. The transcribed interviews were coded and categorised for prominent themes through qualitative data analysis. Some notable factors for which medical students cannot negotiate the meaning are; schooling backgrounds did not include receptive skills tasks or assessments, large classroom sizes with fixed lecture time, and lack of English language skills including the lack of knowledge of grammar, weakness in pronunciation, vocabulary and terminologies. The results revealed that group study, integrating technology in learning, note-taking, background knowledge, diagrams, using L1 for clarification, repetition, elaboration, summarisation, and many more are the strategies that helped the students to overcome challenges. The current study is significant in filling the knowledge gap regarding incorporating meaningful negotiation strategies in medical classes in non-native ESOL context such as Bangladesh and other countries around the world.