Receptive skills plan: Receptive skills – Listening and Reading

Importance: Receptive skills for engineering students

The technical professionals like engineers are more task-oriented and less peopleoriented. They ought to keep pace with rapidly changing time and organizational life to survive. A quasi-academic culture has been replaced by the accelerated pace of a penetratingly competitive market environment, and requires holistic education for the student, a prospective engineer. One of the major reasons for the failure of engineering students in interview is lack of

communicating effectively. Short period notices, deadlines, instant decisions have exposed to the element of more mistakes, poor decisions and miscommunications. As a result, a need for effective receptive skills has been increased as never before for engineering students. In this context Harry E. Chambers quotes Elizabeth Haggerty as,

“Many graduates of engineering and technology schools do not understand organizational dynamics, organizational change or how to be effective in multifaceted organization are both business and technology driven. Basic communication, (both receptive and expressive skills) are lacking…… the scientific and technological environment have changed and good communication skills are necessary, you can’t survive without them.” (Chambers 2001)
Many final year students fall short of confidence to face their campus placements. To have a job and to keep it progressive is a tough task. Acumen in communication does not end with being selected for the job. Beside his technical skills, he requires excellence in interpersonal communication skill to deal with day-to-day activities. There is twenty-eighty ratio of actual engineering and communication between co-workers and superiors. Employers are not simply beholding technical skills. They demand people who can listen and comprehend properly. The workplace requires people who are able to work cooperatively with others. Nowadays, the employers don’t look for engineering geeks who will spend all work time in the office with an engineering calculator. Even if you are the greatest engineer nobody will distinguish you from a common one if you cannot understand or explain to others your thoughts and ideas. Adaptation of different techniques to improve
Communication is less about theory and more about practice. Current communication teaching methodology lacks apposite research as concerned to the acquisition of language and its implementation in teaching. Revolution in the engineering educational procedure will lead students to contribute in communicational development courses and the engineering faculty to focus on the requirement for a broader set of educational aptitudes to cope up with the changing educational culture. For the Engineering faculty these changes involve the use of new educational coaching procedures for the course, and ways in which the faculty can support students to upsurge their capability in augmenting their receptive skills in English.
Practice with different Listening audio devices in different accents, role play, Group Discussions, Presentations can also enhance listening skills along with oratory skill. Conversation practice with fellow students in controlled environment, listening to subject related talk shows, or radio interviews might help in both ways.
There is a need to explore more alternative approaches for improving traditional method of reading. Providing interesting reading material apart from their curriculum, to analyze and

evaluate can bring back their interest in actual reading. As S Shikha advises, some of the reading strategies should include:

o Recognizing the script of a language o Deducing the meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items o Understanding explicitly stated information o Understanding information when not explicitly stated o Understanding conceptual meaning o Understanding the communicative value of sentences and utterances o Understanding relations within the sentence o Understanding relations between the parts of a text through lexical cohesion devices o Understanding cohesion between parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices (Shikha 2012)
As Paul Osterman clearly remarks, “Engineering is a very broad profession that envelops many other sciences and specialties. Engineers cannot spend a lot of time behind the closed office door. They have to communicate and share ideas and thoughts with other collaborators and authorities.” (Osterman 1997)
To sum up, there is a necessity for English professors to provide training to the engineering students for employability. The necessity for scrupulous professional development programs for English professors working in engineering colleges is needed. Moreover, the teaching methodologies of faculty members need to be enriched as large number of students want more interactive sessions to improve their language skills.