English Communication Today: Problems and Perspectives on Communicating in English in the Technical Colleges of Tamilnadu

Abstract

The growing popularity of engineering education and seeking employment in MNCs have boosted the technical students to use English language for both academics and professional communication. This paper examines the prevailing academic and socioethnic influences on L2 learning and discusses about the problems and perspectives of the students and the efforts taken by the management, English and subject faculties in promoting English communication in the technical campus. Qualitative ethnographic case study approach is undertaken to comparatively analyze and discuss about how different instructional strategies and tools are used for creating English zone in the three technical colleges of Tamilnadu. The result shows that literally the students are not able to use English with greater accuracy and hence they favour bilingual teaching. But their strategy awareness towards seeking L2 helps them to use it for seeking knowledge and to engage in open tasks for facilitating interactional communication.