ESP for nursing assistants and home health workers

This paper describes a sequence of two courses in vocational ESL for students preparing for the occupations of nursing assistant and home health worker. The first course provides students with a grounding in general medical concepts and in the special English useful to all health paraprofessionals. It prepares them to meet the entrance requirements for the vocational training course which follows. The second VESL course is more occupation specific and provides language support for the vocational course in nursing assistance or home health in which students are concurrently enrolled. The author has developed and taught the two VESL courses in close coordination with the content of the vocational course. Instructional strategies, especially in the more vocation-specific course, are designed to encourage language acquisition behavior which will allow students to assume responsibility for their own professional learning.