TEACHING COMMUNICATIVE SKILLS TO THE STUDENT COMMUNITY AS A BEST PRACTICE

Abstract

Simply and broadly speaking, any practice that adds to the quality of higher education in any sense may be called as a best practice. In the globalized world, knowing English oral communication has become a foremost requirement in order to get connected to the world community by using it as a means of communication. English is a second language in India. Hence, learning English as a second language is definitely more difficult than acquiring the mother tongue in the Indian context. The reason is the mother tongue of the learner (L1) and English (L2) belong to the different language families. Though English serves the purpose of a link language and a library language in India, it still remains the attribute of only a few well learned citizens of it. There are barriers like lack of proper knowledge and unawareness about the importance of acquiring English oral communicative skills, lack of proper efforts to learn the same and the poor quality of teaching-learning which affect the development of students’ oral abilities; and the same students, when they become the active members of the community, face severe problems of oral communication, wherever it is required, resulting in missing out the opportunities of self and community development. To teach this type of student group, belonging to any programme, the skills of oral communication, the proposed practice may be used by the colleges; especially, the teachers of English have a seminal role in it. With this broad perspective, the practice is being studied. However, considering the wide spectrum of the practice, in the present research paper, only the context of initiating such a practice is discussed.