VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL FORMS OF COMMUNICATION IN BULGARIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN MEDICAL PRACTICE

Abstract

Every year the Medical University of Plovdiv opens its doors to hundreds of foreign students studying in the Programmes of "Medicine", "Dental Medicine" and "Pharmacy". Their training is conducted in English, while Bulgarian is studied as compulsory language in the first and second year or as a facultative discipline after the third year.  

For future doctors, the communicative skills of speaking, writing, listening and reading in Bulgarian are very important during their medical practice. This requires purposeful expansion and consolidation of knowledge in oral and written speech. The article focuses on models for mastering basic verbal and non-verbal communicative forms necessary for the dialogue between doctor-patient, patient-doctor, doctor-medical staff.

Speaking in medical practice is spontaneous, rarely premeditated, so the language training of foreign students emphasizes on the acquisition of structures characteristic of medical scientific expression, as well as achieving certain communicative intentions such as presentation, asking appropriate and accurate questions during the inquiry of anamnesis, giving instructions for medical tests, examination and treatment, making a request, consent, disagreement, giving advice.

In the exposition of the article we offer tested practices in the learning process: structuring a dialogue on a given topic of studied diseases, constructing a text, role-playing games and discussing speech situations occurring in a dialogue between doctor and patient.

Our main goal is to achieve good communicative competence of students and to be able to implement what they have learned in their medical practice.