Celia Roberts

King's College London | KCL · Department of Education and Professional Studies

Background Differential performance in clinical skills assessments is a widespread phenomenon, for which there remain few explanations. Aim To better understand the conversational contexts of simulated consultations and how candidates actually behave in these consultations and to determine sociolinguistic factors for high- and low-performing candi...

Assessment of consulting skills using simulated patients is widespread in medical education. Most research into such assessment is sited in a statistical paradigm that focuses on psychometric properties or replicability of such tests. Equally important, but less researched, is the question of how far consultations with simulated patients reflect re...

Seventy six senior academics from 11 countries invite The BMJ’s editors to reconsider their policy of rejecting qualitative research on the grounds of low priority.They challenge the journal to develop a proactive, scholarly, and pluralist approach to research that aligns with its stated mission

This chapter provides a sketch of the assumptions, values, frameworks and techniques that currently characterise linguistic ethnography. In keeping with the dynamic that makes it a productive and appealing perspective, we ground our account in a series of historical, institutional and/or methodological encounters, looking at the questions and possi...

This book is based on research looking at performance in clinical skills assessment from a linguistic and cultural perspective, with a view to understanding why there are such differential pass rates and giving suggestions on how this issue can be tackled. It is both a research report and a guide to the sociolinguistic methodology used. While the f...

Migration and the mobility of citizens around the globe pose important challenges to the linguistic and cultural homogeneity that nation-states rely on for defining their physical boundaries and identity, as well as the rights and obligations of their citizens. A new social order resulting from neoliberal economic practices, globalisation and outso...

In the globalized cities of the Western world, the number of qualified and experienced workers in low-paid insecure jobs is increasing. Minority ethnic groups are disproportionately represented in these jobs and in unemployment figures generally. The UK is no exception. There is a clear gap in employment rates between the white British majority and...

This survey article looks first at the changing demands of the workplace in a globalized economy. The new work order creates a new word order, and the workforce has become a “wordforce” (Heller, in press) with new genres of language and communication. These changes have taken place at a time when global flows of people, from less wealthy and secure...

The debate over authenticity is a longstanding one in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. This article revisits that debate in the context of linguistic-minority adults who, in the process of migration, experience a loss of independence and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986/2004). Adult migrants must develop authentic voices in t...

Misunderstandings in interactionMisunderstandings caused by patientsMisunderstandings caused by doctorsConclusion Appendix 9.1: Transcription conventionsReferences

This article, based on a unique data set of video-recorded job interviews, examines the institutional and personal discourses of the competency-based interview and how their synthesis produces an `authentic self '. The interview's requirement for the synthesis of work-based and personal identities is particularly disadvantaging to foreign-born mino...

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This article introduces the first collection of articles to be published on research in adult ESOL in the UK and the wider policy context in which this practice has been developed. It also introduces two endpieces – reactions to the collection and reflections on the broader context of adult ESOL research – written by researchers working in the fiel...

This article begins by arguing for some bridge building in ESOL research between what is often seen as a quantitative/qualitative dichotomy. Instead of taking up a position on one side or the other, the differences are construed as different ways of seeing, depending upon the nature of the research questions asked. As a qualitative researcher by tr...

The gap is widening between understanding the subtle ways patients and GPs manage their talk, and superficial discussion of the 'language barrier' among linguistic minority patients. All patients have to explain themselves, not just those for whom English is their first or main language. Patients' explanations reflect how they want the doctor to pe...

Approach: Theme-oriented discourse analysis looks at how language constructs professional practice. Recordings of naturally occurring interactions are transcribed and combined with ethnographic knowledge. Analytic themes drawn primarily from sociology and linguistics shed light on how meaning is negotiated in interaction. Detailed features of talk...

Patients in inner-city areas come from increasingly diverse language and cultural backgrounds. Neither communications training modelled on local English speakers nor the provision of interpreters offer adequate solutions. To identify how patients with limited English and culturally different communication styles consult with general practitioners (...

This paper draws on the PLEDGE research project (Patients with Limited English and Doctors in General Practice) 1 The Patients with Limited English and Doctors in General Practice (PLEDGE) project was funded by Sir Siegmund Warburg's Voluntary Settlement (2001-2003). The research team was: Celia Roberts, Roger Jones, Becky Moss, Srikant Sarangi and...

In the last two decades there has been a growing volume of discourse‐based research in a wide range of professional settings. These studies differ considerably in terms of their choice of analytic frameworks and data sites, but also with regard to the professed/implied inter‐relationship of the researchers with the potential consu...

To assess the effect of ethnicity on student performance in stations assessing communication skills within an objective structured clinical examination. Quantitative and qualitative study. A final UK clinical examination consisting of a two day objective structured clinical examination with 22 stations. 82 students from ethnic minorities and 97 whi...

There is still a great deal to be learnt about teaching and assessing undergraduate communication skills, particularly as formal teaching in this area expands. One approach is to use the summative assessments of these skills in formative ways. Discourse analysis of data collected from final year examinations sheds light on the grounds for assessing...

This paper considers the ethnography of communication, conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistics as frameworks for the analysis of classroom discourse. It discusses their basic assumptions, some of the similarities and differences between them, and their different strengths and weaknesses as resources for applied linguistic problem&...

This book describes a new approach to teaching and learning cultural studies. Borrowing the idea of ethnography from anthropologists, it argues that language students can be taught methods for investigating the cultural and social patterns of interaction and the values and beliefs that account for them. Doing an ethnographic study while living abro...

Candidates from ethnic minorities and those trained abroad may experience particular hidden difficulties with oral examinations. Examination boards - especially those trained abroad - should educate their examiners about these difficulties and their implications. Examples of oral questions, a range of answers, and examiner's comments on these shoul...

Oral examinations are widely used in undergraduate and postgraduate medical examinations, including those for membership of royal colleges. In recent years the validity and reliability of oral examinations have been questioned and they have been dropped from many assessment programmes.1-4 The Royal College of General Practitioners has a tradition o...

This paper recasts the process of learning to use a second language as language socialisation (SLS). But also identifies some limitations of SLS. The social aspects of language learning and use include not only a study of second language interaction but also the wider social outcomes of intercultural encounters. Detailed analyses of encounters betw...

This paper extends the notion of Language Awareness to include intercultural communicative awareness. The interconnectedness of language and cultural processes is illustrated through a discussion of metapragmatic awareness. The second half of the paper looks at the potential for misunderstandings in intercultural communication and charts some of th...

This paper airs some of the issues around the practical relevance of applied linguistics and in particular the relationship between researchers and the institutions and practitioners with whom they work. I suggest that applied linguistics needs to constitute its intellectual base within practical work outside the academy rather than simply applying...

The TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of qualitative and quantitative research. For this issue, we asked two researchers to discuss the politics of transcription in research in TESOL.

This is a detailed study of understanding in a second language, related to the actual lives of minority workers. The focus is on everyday interactions between these workers and the bureaucrats of the society in which they are now resident. It provides an important contribution to the debate about the function of language as a social practice, addin...

This paper deals with the shifting, contested nature of identities in complex urban societies. More precisely, it looks at two work-related contexts - Further Education classrooms and employment Interviews - and examines the responsibilities of both teachers and Interviewers äs gate-keepers in the management and evaluation of social identities. On...

The paper discusses the value of both textual and ethnographic approaches to cultural studies. While recognising the importance of textual cultural studies, I suggest some limitations to it and argue for the centrality of ‘living the ethnographic life’ for any students spending a period of time abroad. Such approach combines the analytical and the...

Discusses the four main tasks involved in designing an appropriate ESP program: (1) preliminary survey, (2) data collection, (3) selection of situations and writing objectives in behavioral terms, (4) syllabus design. Concentrates on the first two, but does give some examples of the last two. (EKN)

This paper is in two distinct parts. In the first part we consider some of the ways in which indirect racial discrimination arises through the actual processes of interaction between participants of different ethnic backgrounds. We also give a brief overview of the approaches to awareness and communications training developed by Industrial Language...