Med school in second language

[indefatigable]

A number of people, mostly in QC and some in ON consider studying in second language (L2) environment (either French or English).  It's anecdotally and empirically known to be sometimes a difficult path (often in QC for anglophones) and I recently came across research recently that backed this up.  

I think this is information worth knowing if one is considering that route, especially to anglophones going into graded French med schools.

In the Austrlian system, the med schools are graded, rather than P/F, but I'd imagine the same general themes are applicable to even P/F schools.  Even though Canada has two official languages, it doesn't mean one can switch automatically from one language to another without any loss and even for those with decent L2 proficiency it can be quite disadvantageous.  

NB:  The IELTS academic is quite a bit more stringent than the TFI used in QC.  

To make a long story short - among other factors, verbal working memory (vWM) goes down quite a bit which hinders ability to do well.  

Note - there's also typically an inherent asymmetry as it's relatively "easier" to become immersed in English rather than French environment.  

Here's a report from the Australian medical student system (link):

"Verbal WM is not the only factor poorer for an L2 learner. McDonald (2006) reported that late English language learners had, in addition to poorer WM, poorer English decoding ability and lower speed of processing in English. Takano & Noda (1993) posited this slower speed of L2 processing as a temporary decline in thinking ability because the demanding processing load interfered strongly with the L2 subject’s thinking, beyond the normal foreign language processing difficulties experienced by non-native speakers."

"In summary, our study contributes to the growing research examining why non-native medical undergraduates generally perform academically worse than their native speaker counterparts despite having good L2 proficiency skills. The implications are that in a prestigious course such as the MBBS degree, where all students have proven high academic abilities, motivation and expectations prior to commencement, small differences at the early stages could have disproportionate impacts on the medical careers of L2 students, for example, in selection for highly competitive specialist training positions or fellowships. The knowledge from this study, therefore, could be used in the training of medical students from diverse backgrounds, for instance, by introducing compulsory language immersion programs prior to commencement of the formal course. An immersion program is typically 3–6 months and forces the student to speak and think in the host country’s language in order to understand the language and the culture. Even for students who have apparently high levels of English proficiency (as gauged for our medical students by the stringent IELTS/TOEFL tests and face-to-face interviews) such immersion programs may prove to improve vWM in the language of instruction simply through more extensive use. This could be either general language immersion, or may be better if targeted to the specific clinical and health sciences language that medical students will encounter on commencement of the course"...

"We note that our study highlights an area where international medical students continually fall down despite rigorous processes and comparable English proficiency. Under these circumstances, we believe that our study provides a strong basis for carrying out procedures as noted above to improve equity of access by international students to resources to improve their academic outcomes"