Communicative competence: A factor to effective intercultural communicative competence for efl learners in the medical pedagogy

Communicative competency of Medicine students is one of the requirements of Medicine education, especially during the Clinical Clerkship period where students is in the third and final year of the Course curriculum for the degree of Doctor of Medicine. As a skilled clinician, they are expected to acquire competencies in verbal communication/collaboration and written communication apart from other skills a medical expert must obtain such as critical thinking, knowledge acquisition and interpretation, manager of self, lifelong learner, community contributor, professionalism and overall ability. Hence, this study investigated the communicative competence as a factor to intercultural communicative competence for English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners in the medical pedagogy. Testing their four (4) macro skills, it made use of a standardized scale by Danao (1986) perusing their levels of competence in three categories: Linguistic, Sociolinguistic and Discourse. The respondents were foreign students in the field of Medicine wherein English is considered a Foreign Language. Findings revealed that most of the participants excelled in subtests B, C, D, G, and H with provision of choices. However, discretionary attention if not ample consideration must be addressed on their writing and listening skills as reflected in the result of their dictation test, business correspondence and cloze test. The need to address their actual writing skills specifically on the technical aspects of writing, grammar structure, diction and basic and optional parts and how to write effective business correspondence must also be taken into account.

It is therefore essential to note the weaknesses of the students in their listening and writing skills where they need to be developed while it is equally necessary to note the sustainability of their skills where they excel. Eventually, the concept of teaching and learning may come from knowing their level of communicative competence paying attention on their strengths as well as their weaknesses where both the teacher and the learner can sustain and obtain. Embracing the idea of Allan and Stoller that, to best facilitate language learning, content and real-life skills, projects/programs require “a combination of teacher guidance, teacher feedback, student engagement and elaborated tasks with some degree of challenge”.