Making health communication accessible: A rhetorical analysis of radio health talk

Abstract

If health professionals require that people adopt the healthy behaviours and recommendations that they champion, they must communicate in plain language that people would understand (Koh, 2010). It is against this background that this paper makes an attempt at investigating the accessibility of the vocabulary choices in medical doctors’ radio health-talk offered on a local radio station at the University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana. Using the theories of genre (Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990) and functional systemic grammar (Halliday, 2002; 2000), the paper examines the lexical features of health talk of medical doctors to see the accessibility of the language to the audience. The study reveals a clear attempt by the doctors to use as little technical vocabulary as possible. Out of over 22, 000 words, only about 64 were technical. In almost all the instances of technical vocabulary use, the doctors made attempts at defining or explaining what the terms meant. Among the personal pronouns examined, you was the most frequently used (34%), followed by we (22.47%) and then it (19.47%). The fourth was they (14.43%), with the least being I (9.70%). These pronouns spread across Moves/Steps within the presentation, with some pronouns occurring in some Moves/Steps more than others. The paper has implications for healthcare delivery and health/medical communication in Ghana and elsewhere