Innovation in Language Learning

Recently, more and more often employees who work in the emergency medical field have to deliver necessary medical services for foreigners, who don’t speak their native language and belong to different, usually unknown culture. In such situations good communication skills are crucial and can lead to the results of patients’ health and satisfaction with medical services. Thus, in the context of increasing international mobility and demographical changes, the need to be able to overcome language and cross-cultural communication barriers in the emergency service sector becomes a relevant and problematic area both for scientific and practical discussions. ICT serves as an attractive tool for learning and is applied in different contexts, for different purposes. In order to solve the problem mentioned above, the EU-funded project VOCAL-MEDICAL is developed. Its purpose – to provide tools that help to decrease the level of miscommunication between patients and medical staff who belong to different cultures and speak different languages. The VOCAL-MEDICAL project delivers two tools (mobile application and Webpage) which provide the learning material on different emergency situations in ten different languages. They include material such as vocabulary, sample dialogues (written and audio), useful descriptions of cultures and countries’ specific information about medical systems. The Webpage also includes tests that can be used to evaluate the learner’s results. The mobile app can be useful in the emergency situations as a tool to ask patient all necessary questions and have an immediate translation for medical staff. The project contributes to bridging the gap in doctor-patient relationships if doctor and patient speak different languages and are of different cultural backgrounds. It gives benefits both for medical professionals and patients of different countries.