AN ANALYSIS OF GRADUATE NURSES’ INTERACTION WITH PATIENTS DURING THEIR PRACTICAL TRAINING PERIOD IN A HOSPITAL IN SAUDI ARABIA

Nursing is popularly viewed as a profession for people who are motivated by altruism and the desire to support people who suffer from illness. When nursing viewed in this manner, being a nurse is primarily concerned with providing better assistance and positive relationships with the patients. The goals of this study are to investigate medical discourse in nurse-patient interactions examining the pragmatic and linguistic aspects particular to that discourse. This paper, which is a case study of the two Saudi students who are doing their practical training in nursing at a hospital in Saudi Arabia describes the linguistic features of the spoken language that occurred between the nurse and the patient in medical interaction. The main findings are to explain how the nurses provide comfort, support and assistance to the patients using spoken language. As the nurses take part in the social practices concerned with doing their job, they construct a relationship with the patient, which goes beyond strictly medical interaction, to include friendlier and more supportive discourse. The study of medical interaction between the nurse and the patient seeks to reveal the linguistic devices being used by both speakers as well as the aspect of comfort talk being used by the nurses to express different social meaning and communicative purposes.