LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Go Beyond Education to Professionalism -
Transition from Campus to Corporate

Rupinder Kaur Gandhi, M.Phil., Ph.D. Candidate

Abstract

The objective of the paper is to show how a trainer has to mould his teaching especially when he or she teaches communication skills and personality development, so that their meets the requirements of the corporate world.

The first part of the paper discusses the difficulties existing in the present teaching world. Campus training should not be confined to classroom teaching. The classroom teaching impacts you alone, while at work your performance impacts the organization as a whole, your bosses and your co-workers.

The second part of the paper deals with proper curriculum which will be entirely practice-oriented. Students will get acquainted with an environment identical to corporate world where they will be trained to meet the deadlines. They will be tested on everyday basis so that they become accustomed to performance reviews and not judge themselves in accordance with the scores in report cards. Emphasis will be on collective projects and critical reasoning.

Introduction

With a very little emphasis on practical knowledge and its implementation, Indian colleges have gained the reputation of churning out muggers minus brains to apply learnt knowledge. This paper tries to explore the present scenario existing in Indian campuses. Let us go beyond education and accept learning's co-operative and communicative approach.

English and communication have created a deep-rooted impact in corporate world. Corporate talk is in terms of profits and, of course business. Why would they recruit candidates who are fully equipped when it comes to core subjects but lagging behind as far as their communication skills and personality development is concerned?

Colleges and universities deserve a fair amount of blame for the lack of critical thinking and problem solving skills among graduates. We need to change the way we teach. Some of us keep saying this but, overall, universities have been slow to change when it comes to communication. No doubt communication as a subject is included in the regular curriculum of professional courses and is treated as a full-fledged subject with titles such as Professional Communication, Business Communication or Communication, etc.

But have we ever seriously considered the following question: Are the students really interested to study literature, especially Francis Bacon or O'Henry or Shakespeare in the form of a communication dosage. Certainly not! What will they do by filling page after page writing about the theories of communication? When at work, a corporate entity demands emotional intelligence, critical thinking and creative as well as sociable mind. If this is the case, then, why English should be treated as a theoretical subject where college pupils are required to get a green signal just to show good results in their mark sheets?

Problems in the Curriculum

The existing curriculum focuses on enhancing learning quotient. It includes the learning and evaluating the subject matter. The students receive considerable passive exposure to grammar, translation, vocabulary and semantic information from written sources, but little exposure to communicative situations, or required to actively use English (West and West 1997).

Why go far, this is in case of many business schools where students are made to mug up the entire lexicon and students feel proud of it when they come up with bombastic words like Epicurism which literally means devotion to food, drinks and pleasures or may be valedutinarium which means one who is anxious about health.

Students give 100% efforts to accumulate all these high sounding words in their brains but problem arises when it comes to its usage. They are not able to form sentences or even if they are able to do it, the words are certainly misused. For example, they can utter lines like, "I love eating that is why I am an Epicurism."

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

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