Dental Student to Patient Communication Analysis: A Pilot Study.

It is very crucial that dental students who comprise our future dental workforce are adequately trained in communication skills. This training is especially important because of the increasing population of English as Second Language (ESL) patients in our community health centers, dental offices, and dental schools. The objective of this exploratory pilot study was to analyze dental student conversations about patient treatment plans to native English and ESL patients. The study recruited four dental students who spoke English as their first language and four patients, two with English as their native language and two with English as their second language from Oregon Health & Science University School of Dentistry. A Panasonic Palmcorder video camera was used to record the dental student to patient procedural conversations, which were then transcribed. Data analysis included rhetorical analysis to explore the argument structures and conversation analysis to explore the linguistic moves used in treatment plan conversations. The results showed three common errors that dental students made while dealing with ESL patients that did not exist with the native speaking patients: The consistent assumption of patient comprehension, the use of over technical jargon, and a lack of use of multi-mediated forms of communication to bridge communicative barriers. There are obvious skills to be learned by the dental students for communicating treatment plans and dealing with ESL patients. Further research and effective teaching resources are needed to better serve our patient population.

Continuity and development in the acquisition of inversion in yes/no questions: dissociating movement and inflection.

This paper examines two- to five-year-old children's knowledge of inversion in English yes/no questions through a new experimental study. It challenges the view that the syntax for inversion develops slowly in child English and tests the hypothesis that grammatical competence for inversion is present from the earliest testable ages of the child's sentence production. The experimental design is based on the premise that a valid test of this hypothesis must dissociate from inversion various language-specific aspects of English grammar, including its inflectional system. An elicited imitation method was used to test parallel, lexically-matched declarative and question structures across several different verb types in a design which dissociated subject-auxiliary inversion from the English-specific realization of the inflectional/auxiliary system. Using this design, the results showed no significant difference in amount or type of children's errors between declarative (non-inverted) and question (inverted) sentences with modals or auxiliary be, but a significant difference for sentences with main verbs (requiring reconstruction of inflection through do-support) and copula be. The results from sentences with auxiliary be and those with modals indicate that knowledge of inversion is present throughout our very young sample and does not develop during this time. We argue that these results indicate that the grammar of inversion is present from the youngest ages tested. Our results also provide evidence of development relevant to the English-specific inflectional system. We conclude with a new developmental hypothesis: development in question formation occurs in integrating language-specific knowledge related to inflection with the principles of Universal Grammar which allow grammatical inversion.