Starting Norwegian language course for minority language speakers
UiA is now holding Norwegian language courses for minority language-speaking nursing students to help them complete their studies.
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Zahara Hussaini is a first-year nursing student, and together with 15-20 fellow students, she is attending the language course organised by the Department of Health and Nursing Science in cooperation with the Division of Student and Academic Affairs at UiA.
"It is great to have a course that will help me understand Norwegian better," Hussaini says. She mentions that understanding the lecturers can be demanding due to both pace and dialect.
"We have noticed that the nursing programme presents unique linguistic challenges, and we have now started a 16-hour course to help students whose native language is something other than Norwegian," Professor Anne Skisland says.
"It is great that UiA is holding a Norwegian language course for us," first-year students Saddam Salissa and Zahara Hussaini says. Sitting behind them is Marlene Romme Mørch from the Division of Student and Academic Affairs who helps organising the course.
The course is both oral and written Norwegian and has themes such as the Norwegian health care system, the welfare state, equality and cohabitation arrangements, Norwegian language and the multicultural Norway. At the start of this course day, teacher Roy G. Tveit collects an assignment that the students were told to write.
"The students get to practice academic writing," Skisland says.
First-year student and course attendee Saddam Salissa also appreciates that they get to learn more about academic Norwegian, which is a requirement for the education, but wants even more academic terminology in the course.
She tells that the course is a pilot project, and that they are working on adapting it even more to the students’ needs."We are going to look into that, and we are also planning to include more caregiving terminology that is used in nursing," Skisland says.
“We want to make a plan that will be a set programme for all minority language speakers on all three years of the bachelor’s programme in nursing," Skisland says.
Gatherings and mentors
The course is one of several measures which the Faculty of Health and Sports Sciences have employed after they saw this autumn the problems that a lack of language skills lead to.
"We have gatherings and trips for the students, and we will also start a mentor arrangement where students who have Norwegian as their native language will be mentors for those who are not as proficient in Norwegian," Skisland says. She is doing a research project where they look at minority language-speaking students’, teachers’ and practical training advisers’ experiences with being a nursing student.
The language course is held in Kristiansand, and later this spring, there will a similar course in Grimstad. Associate Professor Sylvi Flateland is responsible for the arrangement in Grimstad.