English for Placement Purposes: Developing a Needs Based Course for Meeting the Employment Demands of IT Industries

Abstract

The instrumentality for conducting a specific needs based placement course in an engineering programme is to develop relevant employability skills of the technical students to cater to the communicative demands of the industry. This paper is concerned on understanding tertiary level students' language and communication problems while they face job interviews. This article is treated with triangulated multiple sources and methods to analyze the learning needs of the final year Information Technology students and the target demands of the HR Managers. It is found that the technical students need to adopt relevant job related oral and written communication skills to competently perform in on-campus recruitments. With the due emphasis given on examining present and target situational needs, a specific needs based intensive communicative course is designed and developed to satisfy the learners' learning needs and their target situational demands. It reports on how the technical students are able to satisfy the recruiters in their job interviews.

Macro inquiries on needs-based language learning and its implications on ESP syllabus design

“…The process of collecting and gathering information from the students to understand the purpose of language learning can be viewed as needs analysis. Needs analysis is very instrumental as it sheds sufficient light on purpose specification in framing the course (Dovey, 2006;Fareen, 2017). The data that gathered from the present and target situation analysis can be used to distinguish and categorize the general and specific purposes for designing the syllabus.…”

Structural Competence In Engineering Technical Oral Presentations – A Linguistic Dimension

“…It indicates one's ability to express oneself http: //dx.doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2018.05.30 Corresponding Author: Ena Bhattacharyya Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference eISSN: 2357-1330 371 effectively, in written/oral reports and when working with different groups of people (Brunhaver, Korte, Barley, & Sheppard, 2017;Verderber, Verderber, &Sellnow, 2013). For effective communication to take place in any form of oral communicative events (such as technical oral presentations), adequate structures, discourse and rhetorical features are required to make meaning understood in a presentation (Fareen, 2017;Herman, Hall, Kuzawa, Wahlin, & Faure, 2017). However, despite the inclusion of communication skills in the curricula, studies indicate graduates still indicate the gap in linguistic repertoire necessary to present clearly and confidently to the audience (Lavrysh, 2017;Moore & Morton, 2017).…”