Ella Aldengozhayeva

Almaty University of Power Engineering and Telecommunications

Importance of English Communication for Engineering Students from Rural Areas and Its Remedies

English language is the current lingua franca of the international business, technology, aviation, diplomacy, banking computing medicines engineering and tourism. About one fifth of people all over the world know more or less about English.

IMPORTANCE OF ENGLISH COMMUNICATION FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Engineering is the biggest field of study in the world. First of all English is a tool that significantly affect engineering students in academic life. While most of the theories in engineering are taught in English, it requires to have good English commmunication competence. In academic life ,engineering students have to deal with the countless English lectures, tutorials, labs, project reports and papers. Most engineering professors in various univaersities are also conducting lectures in English. The most convenient source of information i.e. Internet provides most of the information in English. During the job seeking process in interviews, GD’s, it is but of crucial importance to achieve mastery in English proficiency. After securing the job they are required to work in groups since their task seldom be solved by an individual. So, being an engineer requires to co-operate and communicate with different people from different part of the world. English is used as the working language on large extent. In order to co-ordinate with the colleagues, engineers have to speak fluent English.

So, English communication competence plays an important role in the academic life and career of engineering students.

SOCIO ECONOMIC BACKGROUND OF FAMILY

Classroom contains students from different strata of the society who possess different grasping power and English communication competence. It is found that the English communication competence of the students who’s parents are literate belongs to higher middle class is better than that of the students whose parents are illiterate and belong to lower middle class. The fact for this situation is the literate parents can provide more exposure to their child to English as they are aware of the importance of English competence. They consult the teacher about child’s progress and guide him/her at home to perform better. Infect it never happens with the second group as they lack parental supervision and guidance from to the higher education

LACK OF SKILLFUL TEACHERS

The other important factor is the education system and lack of skillful teachers. Most of the teachers at all the learning levels are untrained they are unaware of the current trends and advanced techniques of English Language teaching (ELT).The condition is same with the regional medium as well as the English medium primary ,secondary and higher secondary schools in rural or semi urban area. Again teaching –learning process is much exam result oriented. And the exams do test the memory power alone. Even the parents are craving for the marks than skills or knowledge. So, teachers make students to habituate by heart method,, as a result, English seems to be a dreadful demon for the students. This fright remains in the mind till higher education because of lack of proper guidance. Again these exam oriented students give prior importance to their technical subjects than to the communication competence.

EDUCATION SYSTEM

The other important factor is the traditional education system which affects English language learning and acquisition. Basically it requires four skills i.e. Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing.(LSRW).Our students are being trained in reading and writing for long ages and listening and speaking skills are neglected and ignored which are very important. Learning is the one basic skill which makes speaking possible. Learning language is possible only through active listening. As an illustration we can take an example of language acquisition by a baby. It starts speaking the words which it listens frequently. Our education neglects the importance of listening which results in lack of skill of speaking. Lack of modern and advanced technology in the process of language learning also affects the language acquisition. e.g. use of computers and internet, power point presentation

LACK OF EXPOSURE TO THE ENGLISH COMMUNICATION

The rural area students lacks the exposure to the English communication in the family, society as well as in the colleges. As a result of this even the merituous gold medalist fail to achieve success during personal interviews due to lack of communication skills, soft skills, interpersonal skills and personality development. During academics also lack of confidence of being unable to communicate in English leads to feeling of inferiority complex, as a result students keep themselves lonely and isolated.

REMEDIES

Knowing the importance and growing demand of English communication competence for engineering students from rural areas, there a need for the teachers as well the students to make integrated efforts.

1. Faculty is expected to fulfill their assigned responsibilities. But apart from that they should think it as their moral responsibility to take more efforts to provide more exposure to English language for students as to achieve communication competence. The students when forced to learn communication on their own, they find it as a herculean task. So, they expect assistance and warmth understanding from teachers. Now days a comprehensive course which focus on both writing and speaking skills is introduced in most of the universities in Maharashtra. So, during the interactive sessions the students should be encouraged and helped to talk .So, that the students can built an ability to participate in various activities such as paper presentations, GD’s, mock interviews, role plays etc. to develop English communication competence. It is necessary that Students Talk Time (STT) should be higher than Teacher Talk Time (TTT).

2.Students from the secondary and higher secondary level should be given dictionary of technical words with their meanings in regional language for use. The technical teachers should help students in understanding the technical words in English and their equivalents in regional languages. Again they should help the students to understand the meanings of long and complicated sentences in technical subjects.

3.Grammar should be taught in the form of application of it in day to day life. When we learnt first language ,it requires a lot of time .We get a lot of exposure to it as all our communication deals takes place in the regional language. So, it is but natural that it does not require to learn the grammar of regional language. Unfortunatly it does not happen with English which is a second language. From the experience ,it is essential to learn grammar of English as second language for getting confidence of speaking and permorming the best in all walks of life.

4.In this modern era, new trends and methods of teaching are emerging in the learning of the English language competence which involves the use of Computer assisted language learning(CALL) in the Language Labs. Most of the students are tired of the traditional way of teaching and are more interested in doing exercises on a computer than by hand. This system works more effectively when the ratio of computer and student is 1:1

CALL mostly includes:

4.1 Use of Audio /video clips.

4.2 Interlingual method-Listen and see clippings in regional language and

English.

4.3 Language Learning-vocabulary-synonyms and antonyms.

4.4 Etymology reading.

4.5 Grammar.

4.6 Role plays-Speaking task.

4.7 Translation.

4.8 Fluency Task.

By this method of lerning students are provided a lot of practice and exposure to the English language. This method leads to individualization of learning, where teachers acts as mentor, trainer and aspirant to facilitate learning. The teachers should be aware of the latest technologies ,explore new ideas and have certain amount of specialization in the subject. Refresher courses for these teachers at national level can help in achieving proficiency in use of CALL.

5.Students on their own should make use of English journals, televisionprograms, newspapers, magazines, English language Resource centres to aquire the English communication skills.

CONCLUSION

English communication skills are recognized as the important element in the academic life and career of the engineering students. It requires to make use of integrated methods to facilitate advanced communication skills, which is the demand of industry as well as society. The rural area engineering students should effectively make use of the faculty, education system and the amenities provided to them in combination with the self efforts, to emerge as a competent user of English communication to become successful in life and career.

REFERENCES

e-Journal papers:

1 Internet TESL Journal http://www.aitech.ac.jp/-iteslj

2 ISTE-International Society for technology in Education http://www.iste.org

3 computer assisted language learning CALL www.monografias.com

4 www.iste.org/publish/caell.html