Essay On Language Barriers

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Language
Research Paper

Makenna Miller, Tiffany Cisco
4/2/2016
Introduction

How many languages are in the world today, in the average Americans day to day life its pretty normal to hear many different languages in a single day. Thinking about it only a couple languages come to mind like english, spanish, maybe even chinese; but we hear so many more languages then that. As infoplease tells us “there are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. However, about 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers.” After figuring out roughly how many languages there are it isn’t a surprise that sometimes communicating with people who speak different languages is a challenge. Along with just the language the culture
According to a journal, “The Truth About Language Barriers: One Residency Program’s Experience”, residences finishing their graduate medical training at a pediatrics hospital with families that are from a spanish speaking background. According to a questionnaire given to the residences, 68% of them spoke little to no spanish but they did want to learn spanish. On an everyday basis 53% of the residences handled patients and families that spoke little to no english. Because of this barrier the residences felt that the families did not fully understand the diagnosis of their child’s result, what the medications prescribed do, and fully understand what the procedure was as to how to treat their child. Most of the residences stated in the questionnaire that 80% of them avoided communication and contact with those non english speaking families. So when they had to interact and communicate, they used a non proficient interpreter and not a professional interpreter. This type of negative barrier interaction with a non english speaking family led to insufficient interchange, avoidance of interaction and would cause detrimental durden on colleagues (O 'leary,

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