Language Course Design Research Articles

Unemployment among Graduate Nurses in Malaysia: A Case Study

Linguistic and cultural communication skills are essential for nurses as they are at the fore front in public and private hospitals, physicians’ offices, clinics and other outpatient care facilities. Indeed nurses provide the human touch for patients seeking medical advice at a particular medical centre before consulting a physician. Recently, the Ministry of Higher Education has released statistics on unemployment among nurses - about 8000 nursing graduates have not secured jobs. As such, a study was carried out to examine the reason for such a serious situation in Malaysia when other parts of the world are in dire need of nurses. A quantitative methodology was adopted to determine the reason for unemployment among nurses as well as to find ways to relocate these unemployed nurses to parts of the world where their service is needed. This study draws several conclusions about the unemployed nurses and ways to enhance their communication and English language skills to make them more ‘marketable’ as well as be able to execute their duties effectively at workplace. The results indicate a need for a special English language course-design for theses trained nurses.

Challenging Messick: Proposing a theoretical framework for understanding fundamental concepts in language testing

As applied linguists, an important part of our work constitutes the design of language courses, language tests and sometimes even language policies. Clearly, these applied linguistic artefacts, especially language tests (which are the focus of this article) have far-reaching, sometimes negative, effects on our students. As applied linguists what is there in the literature on language testing to guide the work we do, to ensure that our designs have some positive effect? What have the experts in the field of language testing presented us with to ensure that important questions related to the social dimension in testing (issues related to transparency, integrity, accountability, fairness and ethics) are not ignored in the design and administration of language tests? What this article will attempt to do is to show that questions about the social dimension of language testing cannot be adequately answered by Messick (1980; 1989a; 1989b), a conventionally accepted expert in the field. Instead these questions can be answered in a “third idea, other than validity” (Weideman 2009: 239), as outlined by Weideman, an idea that does not foreground one concept but rather identifies a number of fundamental considerations for language testing. Key words : applied linguistics, language testing, social dimension, social defensibility, validity, construct validity, theoretical analysis, framework, constitutive, regulative