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This paper investigates the communication apprehension (CA) and a form of anxiety which affects the engineering undergraduates’ oral communicative skills in English and particularly in oral presentations. However, this study was mainly based on the research question to be investigated: What barriers prevail among undergraduates that handicap their successful language learning and oral communicative skills in English? This study used qualitative instruments for collecting data; the instruments used were included as semi-structured interviews with eight participants and two focus group discussion to explore the barriers among Pakistani undergraduates. The data were analyzed using content analysis of the gathered data. The results revealed that communication apprehension can cause the variety of barriers among undergraduates during oral presentation. The results provided positive insights to communication practitioners and language educators on the issues related to communication apprehension; therefore, certain measures need to be taken to surmount the identified barriers.

Phonetics and phonology are very interesting areas of Linguistics, and are interrelated. They are based on the human speech system, speech perception, native speakers’ intuition, and vocalic and consonantal systems of languages spoken in this world. There are more than six thousand languages spoken in the world. Every language has its own phonemic inventory, sound system, and phonological and phonetic rules that differ from other languages; most even have distinct orthographic systems. While languages spoken in developed countries are well-studied, those spoken in underdeveloped countries are not. There is a great need to examine them using a scientific approach. These under-studied languages need to be documented scientifically using advanced technological instruments to bring objective results, and linguistics itself provides the scientific basis for the study of a language. Most research studies to date have also been carried out with reference to old or existing written literature in poetry and drama. In the current era of research, scholars are looking for objective scientific approaches, e.g., experimental and instrumental studies that include acoustic research on the sound systems of less privileged languages spoken locally in developing countries. In this context, Sindhi is an example of this phenomenon, and un-researched with reference to syllable structure and the exponents of lexical stress patterns.

Thematic analysis has widely been used in qualitative data analysis for theory development. This paper illustrates step-by-step procedure of qualitative data analysis through thematic analysis. Thematic analysis was performed on ten in-depth interviews which were transcribed for analysis. Coding in qualitative research is a systematic process through which the collected data were condensed into smaller analyzable units, called as codes, which were further categorized and developed into themes. Coding process eventually helped researchers to build a general theoretical concept about the qualitative evidence. Major themes that emerged in this analysis include (i) the management issues and (ii) employees’ apprehensions. Findings were interpreted and their implications were discussed in detail in the section of conclusion.

The present study examines the perceptual judgments of English lexical items and English lexical stress by Urdu ESL (Note 1) (English as Second Language) learners. The analysis discusses the different sound systems of both languages and their syllabification system coupled with the stress patterns. The stimuli of 50 high frequency English words were designed as data collection tool for counting the number of syllables and for marking lexical stress as follows: 9 monosyllabic, 11 disyllabic, 10 tri-syllabic, 10 four-syllabic and 10 five-syllabic words. All participating subjects were 40 under graduate students from the department of computer sciences, Sindh Madressatul Islam University (SMIU) Karachi. The findings of the study show English lexical items were syllabified with different numbers and primary stressed syllables were also marked with different places of the lexical items, however, data also show the correct syllabification and the right placement of lexical stress which is a strong evidence manifesting as Urdu-accented English perceived and produced by Urdu ESL learners.