LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Teaching the Intangibles - The Role of the English Teacher

S. Usha Menon, Ph.D. and C. Alamelu, Ph.D.

With Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization (LPG) many multinational firms have set up their facilities in India, leading to employment opportunities at every level and change in the recruitment process as well. Until recently, there was a general opinion that technical knowledge and certification are the prerequisites for an ideal candidate for well-paying jobs in these multinational corporations. But this is not true any longer as there is an unquestionable paradigm shift in the demands of the corporate world. As Carole (2002) puts it, "More and more corporations around the world recognize that, in order to gain a competitive advantage, they also need to make sure their people know how to handle themselves at work and how to relate with their customers and peers". To achieve this magical transformation, soft skills are essential.

What are soft skills?

A distinction is maintained between soft skills and hard skills. While hard skills refer to technical and academic skills, soft skills refer to wide-ranging personal and interpersonal skills. Academic and technical skills can be more easily defined, observed and measured. However, the measurement of personal and interpersonal skills requires complex factors. These are difficult to define, observe and measure and hence they are intangible. Such skills involve items such as inter-personal etiquette, netiquette (appropriate practices and use of expressions and content in Internet and e-mail communications, etc.), appropriate lexical choice, use of style, meaning and sentences, etc. These also include tone of friendliness, optimism, and various techniques of persuasion.

It is well recognized that soft and hard skills go hand in hand in any individual who has proved to be successful in management and business deliberations.

The Indian Scenario

Recruiting agencies always report that the number of "employable" engineering, technology, science, business and management graduates in India continues to be low. This, indeed, is a paradoxical situation. There is enormous and spectacular growth in well-paying job opportunities, a huge number of engineering and other graduates are produced every year, but there is a severe dearth of employable graduates. The globalization of the industries and the consequent spurt in the job scene has suddenly found us wanting in the area of soft skills; in fact, the economic boom is now threatened because the effectiveness and growth of India's talent pool has been seriously constrained due to a deepening soft skills crisis.

The recent NASSCOM report endorses this fact by stating that 75 % of the engineers are not employable since the focus is always on academics and theory. The report demands that equal importance be given to skill building and practical training to give the graduates a competitive edge.

Though the soft skills crisis is a universal phenomenon, the problems and reasons in the Indian subcontinent are peculiar because for the following reasons:

• Our educational system is so designed forcing students to concentrate more on rote-learning than on developing a spirit of enquiry, which is the most predominant factor to achieve success at work place. As Variyar (2009) points out, "A study across four engineering service industries in India revealed the top challenges as - Not asking enough questions, assuming customer/authority figure is always right, Being afraid to ask questions and assuming everything is understood based on whatever customer has told us.
• During their high school education, many engineers would have neglected studying humanities, languages and arts as a result of parental and peer pressure to master science and mathematics, subjects that help clearing competitive entrance exams. In this process, an all-rounded development of complementary human intelligences and faculties like creativity and inter-personal skills is stunted. (Variyar 2009)
• The syllabus of most Indian Universities is not frequently updated and so they remain outdated resulting in a wide industry-academic gap. This is the crucial challenge that needs to be targeted. Now, the leading corporations have taken steps to train the teachers as well as introduce value-added courses for the students: Wipro 10x, CCNA by CISCO, and Infosys-Campus Connect are a few such initiatives. Some Universities have also already taken a right step by including soft skills as part of their curriculum, for instance, GE1352 - Communication Skills Lab by Anna University, Chennai.

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Ergativity in Pahari Language | The Robustness of Free Reading in Second and Foreign Language Education | Conversational Cloze as a Measure of Ability in English in Indian Schools | Teaching the Intangibles - The Role of the English Teacher | Failures and Disillusionment in Naipaul's Miguel Street | Issues and Problems in Ph.D. in English - Degree Quality Assurance in Pakistan | Socio-Linguistic Constraints of Code Switching in Hindi-English-Kannada Multilinguals | Nature of Perception according to Gautama | The Quintessence of Sports Psychology and Language | Some Characteristics of Tamil Jokes | Lexical Opposites in Tamil | The Fire and the Rain - Deriving Meaning for Modern Life from Myths | Realilty and Challenges for Tamil in a Multilingual Environment - Tamil in Malaysia: An Essay in Tamil | Teaching and Learning a Classical-Modern Language - Some Thoughts Relating to Tamil | HOME PAGE of December 2009 Issue | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR