Bridging the Gap between Education and Employment
English Language Instruction in EFL Contexts
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- Contents
- Introduction
- Teaching Effective Communication Strategies to EFL Learners
- The Effect of Teaching Communicative Strategies on Students’ Willingness to Communicate in an Iranian Context
- Modeling Conditions for Students’ Communication Skills Development by Means of a Modern Educational Environment
- Fostering Oral and Written Communication Skills in EFL via the Use of Student-created Digi-videos
- Advice among the Flowers: A Learner’s Speech Act
- Investigating Vocabulary Teaching Modules for Preschoolers: The First Phase of a Design Experiment
- The Effect of the First Language on the Pronunciation of Lower Intermediate Omani Students
- Rhyming and Singing: Tongue Training Toward Second Language Automaticity
- Reducing Anxiety through Enhancing Omani EFL Learners’ Emotional Intelligence
- EFL Learners’ Anxieties: Tertiary-level Strategies among Omanis
- Communication, Identity and Workplaces in English Language Teaching in the Tertiary System in Oman
- Constraints on Intercultural and Pragmatic Competence Development in EFL Classroom Contexts
- Culture, Globalization and L2 Education
- Cognitive Styles in Intercultural Competence Development when Teaching English to Non-Linguistic Students
- Intercultural Communication and the Negotiation of Local and Foreign Cultures in the EFL Literature Classroom
- Learning from the Margins: Teaching Language, Culture and Communication through World Literature in the EFL Classroom
- Taking Charge: Improving EFL Students’ Language Proficiency, Academic Skills and Professional Preparation via Student-led Activities
- Employability, English Proficiency and Communicative Ability in the Arabian Gulf
- Notes on Contributors
- Series index
RAHMA AL-MAHROOQI & CHRISTOPHER DENMAN
Bridging the Gap between Education and Employment through English Language Instruction in EFL Contexts
The link between education and employability is well-established. Yorke (2006) maintains that governments around the world have imposed an overriding aim of enhancing graduate employability on national education systems. This goal is claimed to have a number of benefits for both graduates themselves and society at large. For example, a greater chance of finding a suitable job after graduation may increase graduates’ levels of social mobility and economic success, while also making them more independent and self-reliant (Voith, 2013). In terms of potential social benefits, higher levels of graduate employability have been argued to make national economies more productive, in addition to increasing citizen participation in the functioning of their societies and subsequent levels of social stability. It is these factors that are often of great concern in outer and expanding circle nations, as witnessed by the ‘Arab Spring’ with its links to issues of political inclusion and youth unemployment (Kolster & Matondo-Fundani, 2012).
For education to successfully bridge the gap between school and the world of work in ways that ultimately benefit the individual and society, it is important for ministries, policymakers, education institutions, instructors and other stakeholders to understand the skills, attitudes and abilities that are most intricately linked with employability in a given context. A number of authors claim that education and training should focus on the development of academic and soft employability skills in order to meet this challenge, with the latter referring to a collection of skills that includes team building, leadership, motivation, presentation skills, time management, problem solving, self-management, numeracy and communication and literacy (Gravells, 2010; Rao, 2010). Of these, ← 9 | 10 → it is communication and literary skills that are often most closely linked with employability in those EFL contexts where English plays a dominant role, with a UNESCO (n.d.) report about education in Afghanistan placing these skills at the very centre of societal happiness and well-being.
However, while ‘communication’ is a word that is frequently used, defining it, especially in relation to employability, is no simple task. Rosenbaum (2005) defines communication as the “process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behaviour” (p. 1). However, this has been contested by scholars such as Lane (2000) due to the lack of focus on the ways in which communication actually occurs. Lane maintains that communication should be conceived of as a way of conveying referential or affective information either by speaking, writing, behaving or using signals which are understood by addressees. This definition acknowledges the ways in which we ‘understand’, rather than merely ‘exchange’, information. It is this which the author posits as the primary aim of communication, with the moment the communicator comprehends meaning being the moment that the communicative aim is fulfilled.
Communicative competence is intricately linked with conceptualizations of communication and has proven equally difficult to define. According to Ohno (2006), Chomsky introduced the concept of communicative competence when seeking to draw a clear distinction between competence and performance. In doing so, communicative competence was posited as the shared knowledge of an ideal speaker-listener operating in a homogeneous speech community which enables them to understand and use the language appropriately. However, Hymes (1972) argues that such a definition covers only very strict and idealized situations and subsequently contends that communicative competence has two categories − linguistic, which deals with the structure of sentences, and communicative, which deals with the comprehension of these sentences and their use in a specific situation. Hymes builds upon this definition by stating that communicative competence involves an awareness of language which enables its speakers to use it appropriately in terms of place, time and addressee. ← 10 | 11 →
Brown (2001) adds that communicative competence is one of twelve principles of the pedagogy of English as a foreign language. These can be grouped into cognitive, affective and linguistic principles, although Brown notes that they have porous boundaries and are interconnected. Bachman (1990) adds that communicative competence involves the use of authentic language in context, in addition to fluency and the mechanics of language use. In this way, communicative competence is comprised of organizational, pragmatic, and strategic competences, in addition to psychomotor skills. For these reasons, communicative competence cannot be sufficiently developed in the classroom by an exclusive or even primary focus on teaching English grammar. Tubtimtong (1993) claims that, in order to develop communicative competence, tertiary-level students in EFL contexts are in need of courses that allow for the active and meaningful use of English, while also promoting learner participation and building their confidence in using the language. Canagarajah (2006) supports this stance by highlighting how a focus on the abstract features of English in the classroom may occur at the expense of developing learners’ pragmatic skills. These pragmatic skills can involve the teaching of speech acts and language functions that are related to the conventions of the English language. Or, more specifically, they are related to what is said, how it is said, when it is said, and to whom it is said. In this way, pragmatics seeks to understand the appropriateness of an utterance in a particular context.
Despite the importance of the development of pragmatic skills for learners’ personal and professional lives, a limited development of communicative skills remains a major challenge for many learners and especially for those in outer and expanding circle nations. This is often the case in those contexts where English acts as gatekeeper to academic and/or social success, though where it is not commonly used as a first language. Shaw (2011), describing the necessity of English-language communication skills in the Arab world, links the development of these skills to the future stability and prosperity of a number of nations in the region, and claims that it is necessary for a widespread cultural and attitudinal shift to occur to allow students at schools and universities to actively develop them. Such a cultural and attitudinal shift, the author states, will need to be associated with a greater alignment between ← 11 | 12 → education, industry and quality assurance in skills training. Without it, however, Robinson (2000) predicts that the “failure to equip young people with the job readiness skills critical to job success is equivalent to placing employability barriers in their path” (p. 2).
According to Turebayeva and Doszhanova (2013), if educators want to help their students to realize their individuality, then they have no choice but to develop their communicative competence. The authors view communicative competence as an integral quality of a student’s personality and emphasize the importance of teaching it in ways that can contribute to societal development. From this perspective, “the main objective of higher education today is training graduates who can adapt to the rapidly changing conditions of life and are ready for the independent search of information for self-development and self-realization” (p. 1316). The authors maintain that communication is “realized by individuals who use their communicative competence, identify tactics and strategies of communicative behaviour and accumulate personal communicative experience” (p. 1318).
Perhaps in acknowledgement of the importance of communicative skills for social, academic, and professional success, there is a growing interest in the skills and competencies that school and university graduates actually require in an ever-changing and increasingly globalized world. One of the results of this academic attention has been a notable increase in the amount of theoretical and empirical research that attempts to identify these skills, describe their nature, and examine how they are taught at universities and schools (Hewitt, 2005; Robinson, 2000; Robinson & Garton, 2008). For example, Wagner (2008) identified the top seven survival skills needed for the 21st century as critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration across networks and leading by influence, agility and adaptability, initiative and entrepreneurship, accessing and analyzing information, curiosity and imagination, and effective oral and written communication. However, in terms of the development of these skills, Wagner reports that:
The biggest skill people are missing is the ability to communicate: both written and oral presentations. It’s a huge issue for us… We are routinely surprised at the difficulty some young people have in communicating: verbal skills, written skills, presentation skills. They have difficulty in being clear and concise; it’s ← 12 | 13 → hard for them to create focus, energy, and passion around the points they want to make (p. 35).
Australia’s Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations (2012) similarly offers a list of communication skills that it believes to be critical for adult learners. These include the ability to clarify and agree upon boundaries and expectations of the learning relationship, confirm, clarify or repair understanding, provide constructive feedback, and use verbal and non-verbal language and concepts appropriate to individual and cultural differences (p. 8). As these lists imply, written and oral communication skills are frequently at the centre of the skills that employers desire their graduates to possess. Allan (2006) maintains that “these skills are, of course, inextricably linked to other skills examined here such as presentations, gathering, organizing and synthesizing information and data” (p. 21). Other skills that can be added here include team-work, interacting and listening, and cultural awareness and sensitivity.
Rantanen and Moroney (2012) examined the knowledge and skills that employers expected of recently graduated ergonomics professionals in the workforce. The authors claim that some of the most important skills included the ability to engage in effective interaction in cross-functional and multi-disciplinary teams, thus highlighting the value of communicative skills in facilitating exchanges between differing professional groups often with different backgrounds and professional discourses. Rantanen and Moroney suggest that the development of human factors curricula in formal education is one response to the increasingly complex nature of the demands new professionals face upon entry into the workplace.
Many researchers associate graduate attributes and employability skills with interpersonal and written communication skills. Written communication guidelines that can enhance success are explored in a study by Veldhuijzen, Ram, van der Weijden and van der Vleuten (2013). The authors identified five key attributes for communication skill training: complexity, level of detail, format and organization, type of information, and trustworthiness/validity. They recommended relating these attributes to the expertise of learners and specific educational functions. In addition to the oral and written communication ← 13 | 14 → and teamwork skills which the authors recognize as valuable for future employability, there is a need for skills associated with intercultural communication. According to Scott’s (2012) exploration of the skills and competencies of engineering students, intercultural communication competency should be explicitly included in curricula to educate students as global citizens. These globally-aware citizens should then be capable of working tactfully and effectively in workplaces in international settings.
Yates (2008) further highlights the culturally-bound nature of communicative competence with the statement:
Generic skills in communication and teamwork are especially problematic for job seekers and employees from other language and cultural backgrounds as they are frequently assumed to be relatively self evident and simply in need of practice rather than illustration, exploration and explication. Yet the exact way in which these skills are actually understood and practiced in daily life is not universal across cultures, that is, not all cultures have the same understanding about what is clear or polite communication or how you ‘do’ teamwork. So, although those who have grown up in a particular community may share norms on what good communication or good teamwork is, those who have not grown up in this community do not necessarily share these norms. They may therefore have great difficulty in recognizing them and learning how to do them in English (p. viii).
In linking cultural factors to communicative competence, Turebayeva and Doszhanova (2013) distinguish between two sets of conditions for communication expertise development to occur. The first relates to external conditions that include the socio-cultural context, ethnicity, state, national traditions, socially-accepted cultural and moral values, the social and cultural features of educational institutions, the specificity and content of teaching activities, and so on. The second is associated with internal assumptions such as personal inclinations, individual psychological characteristics, the activity of the individual, experience, and so on. The authors maintain that communicative competence is a complex multifactor phenomenon which includes a system of interdependent and mutually reinforcing components such as socio-cultural orientations, knowledge, and generalized communication skills.
Following from the nature of these conditions, Turebayeva and Doszhanova (2013, pp. 1321–1322) identify three levels of communicative ← 14 | 15 → competence formation. Students with high levels of communicative competence have developed: mechanisms of acceptance, understanding, self-control, emotional stability, balance, empathy, friendliness; and have the ability to: show respect and tolerance, be sensitive to other’s needs, seek help, show a steady and positive experience of moral behaviour, choose friends regardless of their temperament, constructively cooperate with others, not enter into conflict, be sociable and respectful of the interests of the members of the group, work together, and persuade, explain, coordinate, assist and so on.
An average level of communicative competence formation is said to be present in students who are not characterized by all the components highlighted above, but by predominantly positive emotional attitudes towards others and generally positive behaviour. Such students willingly take part in communication though they do not show initiative in organization. Finally, students with low levels of communicative competence formation often have very little responsiveness, compassion, sympathy or empathy; they constantly enter into conflict, address unfriendly remarks to others, are driven by their non-acceptance, and often display a lack of understanding and indifference. The authors suggest some guidelines for developing communicative competence in higher education through increasing learners’ awareness of cognitive (knowledge) levels, levels of activities (process), and an increase in reflexive competence (openness in communication, inclination to empathy, tolerance, self-esteem, socio-psychological adaptability, etc.).
Evidence of the importance of these communication skills, in addition to linguistic and pragmatic competences, has also been outlined by a number of studies. For example, Ameen (2013) examined the need and impact of communication skills and the teaching of personality development for information sciences students. The author highlighted the need for extensive learning and social skills as a part of these students’ educations. Amorin (2013) explored the oral communication skills of undergraduate university students in a Portuguese university and found that, in order to overcome a number of potential hurdles to the development of communicative skills such as speaking anxiety and the fear of negative teacher evaluation, they must be exposed to opportunities to express their opinions in English in ways that support the ← 15 | 16 → future demands of their professional careers. The author emphasizes the relevance of English’s position as the world’s lingua franca in offering an increasing number of opportunities for students to maximize their speaking opportunities and to develop their fluency and real-life communication skills.
In addressing the need for developing students’ professional communication skills, El-Sakran, Prescott and Mesanovic (2013) report on the procedures employed to contextualize communication skills through multidisciplinary projects for engineering students. According to the authors, students’ understanding of team-role behaviour can be positively influenced through heightened levels of self-awareness and contextualized work. A study by Rantanen and Moroney (2012) sought to identify student perceptions of their skills and the development of the skills demanded by their future professions. The authors suggest that students from a variety of universities and colleges in the US are in need of supervised internship opportunities which allow them to enhance their communicative and other work skills while working as members of a team on real life projects.
In response to these calls, a number of researchers have identified effective ways of teaching communication skills to their students. Most of the suggested methods give priority to active training which “allows learning in a situation close to reality” (Turebayeva & Doszhanova, 2013, p. 1322). Henry, Holmboe and Frankel (2013), using an example of graduate students of medicine, emphasize the importance of designing practical and meaningful ways in which communication skills can be taught and assessed. Sreehari (2012) investigated possibilities and problems in the implementation of communicative language teaching techniques. The author highlighted the importance of adopting learner-centred classroom techniques in order to allow opportunities for learners to develop their communicative skills.
Barnes and Smith (2013) describe an approach they believe can facilitate student understanding of organizational culture. They suggest an assignment that consists of various components, such as locating a research site, administering questionnaires, processing quantitative data, analyzing qualitative data, preparing formal reports, and making oral presentations. According to the authors, collaborative work by students ← 16 | 17 → can allow them to not only explore various research methods, but also to refine their written and oral communication skills, provide them with team work experience and practice reflective and critical thinking skills.
As is apparent in the complexity with which it can be defined, developed, and taught, communication as a concept concerning how we inter-relate does not affect us as individuals only; it also affects the environment we live in, including the workplace where employees communicate with each other and with their clients. Oral communication, written communication and speech acts reflect three skills that have been addressed above in terms of their impact on students and workers and even the success of institutions. Findings reveal that success can be achieved when these communicative skills are developed and employed in educational institutions or in the workplace, especially when they are presented in ways appropriate to the socio-cultural context. By implication, there is a clear need for employees to be trained in communicative skills so that they can be used more frequently and efficiently.
In acknowledgement of the ways in which language teaching and learning entails the teaching of language, pragmatic and communication skills as outlined above, this book addresses these areas with the aim of offering guidance for instructors, administrators, and other concerned stakeholders who are interested in the promotion of these skills in the classroom. The book begins with an exploration of the kinds of communicative skills and strategies that are deemed important in today’s globalized world. K. THOMAS BABY begins by detailing some of the communication problems that speakers of English as a second or foreign language experience through an examination of communication acts in specific situations. The author examines various typologies of communication that can be used to enhance these learners’ communicative and pragmatic competence, and concludes by suggesting a number of language learning activities that can help develop learners’ abilities to communicate in real life contexts.
In the second chapter, SOMAYEH GERAMI and JAFAR DORRI KAFRANI discuss the effects of teaching communicative strategies to Iranian students on their willingness to communicate after providing them with speaking strategies to help fill gaps in their linguistic knowledge. With the rationale that the focus of language learning pedagogy should ← 17 | 18 → be on creating opportunities for learners to actually communicate, the authors report how the explicit teaching of the speaking strategies of circumlocution, approximation, non-linguistic signals, and all-purpose words increased respondents’ talk time even in those cases when they displayed limited linguistic knowledge. OLGA ANDREEVNA OBDALOVA follows by describing the implementation of a conceptual framework specifically designed to meet the objectives of a foreign language teaching program in Russia. The author details the ways in which some of the many factors that influence language learning, such as institutional conditions, personal resources, and cultural dimensions, can be incorporated with pedagogy and technology to improve the effectiveness of teaching and, hence, enhance student language learning success. SAMIA NAQVI and RAHMA AL-MAHROOQI share a similar concern with the ways in which technology can be utilized in the classroom as a central part of pedagogy to improve learners’ communication skills. The authors offer the results of an experiment in an Omani university that involved the use of student-created English-language digital-videos as a means of providing an authentic task involving learners in a real life communication situation. The research reported in this chapter suggests that participants’ motivation, confidence, and communication skills improved through the video-creation project.
Next, ANN MCLELLAN HOWARD focuses on the speech act of offering advice in English during the teaching of a Japanese flower arrangement class by a native speaker of Japanese. The author’s recordings of several ikebana classes reveals that her teacher, though not producing advice in an entirely native-like manner in English, nonetheless manages to employ the mitigation strategies of praise, anecdotes, and the avoidance of hearer agency to compensate for limited pragmalinguistic competence in some areas. The author highlights how an awareness of the sociopragmatic norms associated with English allows her instructor to use these strategies to meet communication goals. SITI BAHIRAH SAIDI, LIYANA AHMAD AFIP, BAZILAH RAIHAN MAT SHAWAL, YOHAN KURNIAWAN, JULIA TAN YIN YIN and NORHAINI MAT LAJIS then look at efforts to improve the teaching of English vocabulary in a Malaysian preschool in response to the reported low English-language literacy skills of students in the country. In discussing some of the issues that ← 18 | 19 → preschool teachers encounter in teaching English vocabulary in their lessons, the authors report that participants find the prescribed modules for vocabulary instruction to be too time-consuming and difficult to integrate, while their young learners find it hard to maintain focus during lessons. The authors suggest that, to overcome these challenges, vocabulary instruction tools be integrated into the classroom through the use of animated videos.
JAISHREE UMALE next examines the effects of the first language on the English pronunciation of lower intermediate level Omani university students. With the belief that pronunciation is the most difficult area to master when learning a foreign or second language, the author reports that respondents experienced difficulties dealing with the segmental and suprasegmental features of English and that they were often unaware of the rules related to the pronunciation of plurals. The chapter recommends that Omani students be sensitized to new phonology by paying particular attention to the specific features of English before being asked to use it in the classroom. In the next chapter, NORHAINI HJ MAT LAJIS focuses on the potential benefits of using English language rhymes that can be sung or chanted. By engaging in such teaching practices with young Malaysian learners of English, the author highlights how students can not only improve their pronunciation while memorizing new words, but can also be exposed to English grammar and sentence structure in a fun and easy way. This, the author claims, increases learners’ motivation to use the language.
CHANDRIKA BALASUBAMANIAN and RAHMA AL-MAHROOQI then examine the relationship between Emotional Intelligence and anxiety among Omani university students studying in an English-medium environment. The authors’ place their investigation within the context of English as the world’s lingua franca and the resultant need for students to develop communicative competence in the language to be able to communicate effectively. They conclude with the claim that it is important to foster learners’ Emotional Intelligence in order to improve academic achievement. In the following chapter, ASFIA KHAN and RAHMA AL-MAHROOQI similarly acknowledge the potential negative impact of anxiety on Omani EFL learners and seek to explore the ways in which these students go about dealing with this issue. The chapter explores the ← 19 | 20 → frequency with which these students use preparation, positive thinking, assistance seeking, and media and technology strategies and, in doing so, examines these strategies in relation to the variables of gender and language proficiency. The authors offer a number of recommendations for developing learners’ strategies for dealing with anxiety.
A number of contributors took the relationship between communication, culture and identity as the foundation of their chapters. SINDHU HARISH, for example, reports on an evaluation of English for Specific Purpose textbooks widely used in Oman’s tertiary system with a particular interest in the extent to which these textbooks take into account learners’ sociopolitical and cultural identities, the nature of future workplaces and existing networks of communication. After exploring the sense of deficit often associated with the use of locally-produced teaching materials, the author looks at the ways in which learners deal with issues associated with English language learning, power and politics. ABDELKADER CHAOU then explores the nature of the constraints on intercultural and pragmatic competence development in EFL contexts. The author examines the widely held belief that English language teaching should subsume intercultural pragmatic competence in order to produce effective communicators with reference to both ESL and EFL contexts. After offering an examination of the difficulties associated with intercultural pragmatics in EFL contexts, the author contends that teaching academic English is the most appropriate approach in these settings.
TAREK HERMESSI discusses the link between culture, globalization and L2 language learning with the aim of highlighting how differing theories of culture and globalization have affected applied linguistics and L2 education. The author adopts this approach so as to problematize the cultural dimension of English language teaching while acknowledging the perceived threat of English to local cultures. The chapter concludes by asking how successful attempts at limiting teaching to the structural and functional aspects of a language without reference to cultural load have been. ALEKSANDRA V. SOBOLEVA follows with an exploration of the integration of cognitive, learner-centered and intercultural approaches to teaching foreign language communication. This chapter maintains that an essential condition for effective intercultural communication to ← 20 | 21 → occur is cognitive readiness which consists of cognitive skills and the communicative ability to take part in intercultural dialogue.
RAHMA AL-MAHROOQI and CHRISTOPHER DENMAN expand upon the issue of the negotiation of local and foreign cultures in EFL classrooms, this time with a particular interest in the teaching of English-language literature. After claiming that intercultural communication skills are amongst the most important that learners can posses across a number of international domains, the authors provide some of the ways in which these skills can be developed through the use of authentic literary texts including short stories, speeches and so on. In doing so, the chapter argues that the inclusion of authentic texts can help bridge the social and psychological distance between learners’ home cultures and the cultures associated with the language of the text. SANDHYA RAO MEHTA and RAHMA AL-MAHROOQI adopt a similar concern with teaching language, culture and communication through literature. After exploring the ways in which literature has traditionally been employed in language classrooms, the authors argue that using it to teach English as a foreign language can be best achieved through not only the use of texts from the English literary canon, but also through the careful selection of international works representing a diversity of human experience. In particular, the authors highlight how the use of texts that are more relevant to EFL learners’ linguistic, communicative and intercultural skills is vital for developing their communicative competence.
Details
- Pages
- 416
- Year
- 2016
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783035108422
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783035193190
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9783035193183
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783034316811
- DOI
- 10.3726/978-3-0351-0842-2
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2015 (December)
- Keywords
- ESP English for Specific Purposes Foreign Language Learning L2
- Published
- Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2016. 416 pp.
