practical living
From little
things
New staff training aims to
bridge the language barrier,
foster stronger relationships
between residents and carers.
By Conor Burke
A
new training kit has been
developed to help foster stronger
relationships between carers and
aged care recipients.
The creation of The Little Things
training kit was led by the Farnham
Street Neighbourhood Learning Centre
in partnership with Meaningful Ageing
Australia and contains evidence-based
intercultural language training materials for
personal care assistants from culturally and
linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds
working, or training to work, in aged care.
It is all about increasing the confidence
of students and helping them engage with
older Australians in a meaningful way in
their future careers.
Approximately 6.9 million Australians
were born overseas and 23.2 per cent of
homes speak another language as well as
English, and it is estimated that 32 per cent
of RACF workers were born overseas, so
finding a way to communicate in a diverse
society is key for care workers.
The idea was formed by Pip Mackey,
project coordinator of The Little Things
training, as she taught English while
22 agedcareinsite.com.au
studying for her master’s in applied
linguistics. Mackey taught an Ethiopian
student who often struggled with
grammatical English and worked in aged
care while she studied.
“I became interested in that, thinking of
the complexity of the work of a personal
care assistant, which we call PCAs. With that
complex work, with this sort of low, strictly
low level of English, how was she managing
to bridge that divide?” said Mackey.
“I was also studying this use of pragmatic
language, which is the rules and tools of
how we make meaning between ourselves
and the other person, and how we
understand or misunderstand each other.
So, she was my sort of ‘person zero’ on that,
and I did some study activities with her and
looked at how she had all these pragmatic
language skills, even though maybe her
verbs didn’t agree with their pronouns, and
was clearly very effective in the way she
connected with an older person.”
This initial idea led Mackey to seek and
receive funding through the Workforce
Training Innovation Fund, the Department
of Education and Training in Victoria.
Mackey spoke with Aged Care Insite to
discuss the project and how it can improve
the lives of aged care recipients.
ACI: What does the training include?
PM: The key tools are six films. The Little
Things project involved going and making
recordings of personal carers working with
older people. So, the participating PCAs, who
were nominated as displaying best practice
by older people living in aged care homes or
by senior staff, were interviewed as were the
senior staff and trainers in our RTOs to find
out what they saw as the most important
things that people needed to know and
learn. Best practice PCAs wore little audio
recording devices and made recordings with
older people who volunteered to be part of it
over a course of three days.
We used those recordings, after coding
and analysing them, to form the backbone
of six films. So, everything relies on
authentic language use and the practise
that we observed in the aged care homes,
as well as what occurred in the recordings.
They’re not scripted as such as using
chunks of authentic language. It includes
a lot of what we call ‘little words’ that are
really quite important and often overlooked
and rarely something that you teach a
person, but they are discourse markers.
So, they’re the words like the ‘so’ or the
‘okay’ and the ‘aha.’
A lot of those little sounds are
interspersed through our language and
they perform really important functions
in the way we communicate. So, the films
highlight those as well as highlighting other
language strategies people use, such as
how they might connect with an older
person as they go along.