Minä sairaanhoitajana: tulevaisuuden minuudet motivaatiota muokkaamassa
I as a nurse: Future selves making the motivation

Summary/Abstract: Work-related language skills of international workforce in the health care sector have been under a public debate. However, there has been little discussion about international nursing students and their language skills. The aim of this study is to explore what kind of expectations the international students in the degree programme in nursing have about their language skills and their future selves, and how these affect their motivation during the practical training periods. The theoretical framework is based on a sociocognitive approach, combining dialogical and sociocultural perspectives, where language and motivation are seen as shared, dynamic and varying phenomena. Motivation is related to one’s identity and agency. The data consist of six semi-structured interviews with four international nursing students and six interviews with their six practical training mentors. To find out what kind of future selves the students envision for themselves, narrative analysis and dialogical analysis of beliefs are applied. The results suggest that future selves have an effect on commitment to learning Finnish. However, students must perceive the language learning opportunities in the environment and get an access to them too. Perceiving these opportunities indicates agency, and agency develops with the help of others: the role of the working community is crucial. The study is a part of the project Finnish as a work language: A sociocognitive perspective to work-related language skills of immigrants (University of Jyväskylä 2011–2013).

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