Tamil Nadu Engineering Colleges to Teach ‘Better’ English to Students

Chennai: The engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu are mulling to introduce English Learning Programmes to improve the communication skills among students.

According to recent study, Chennai is being raked the lowest metro to have engineering graduates with good spoken English skills.To tackle the issue colleges in Tamil Nadu are introducing programmes, which aims at providing learning situations to students and enable them to communicate well in English.

TamilNadu Engineering Colleges to Teach English

Speaking to TOI, Kala Vijayakumar president of SSN College of Engineering said "Students coming from remote areas are not able to construct a simple sentence when they enter engineering."

"The college conducts English tests to understand their proficiency levels and accordingly bring in trainers to coach students in different batches." she added.

English is present as part of the curriculum in the first year of engineering, Prof Murugavel of SVCE said language learning doesn't take place in classrooms as English is treated as 'yet another subject' by students across colleges.

While language labs are present in engineering colleges, English teachers say the proficiency depends on how effectively the language is taught in the classrooms. They are also of the opinion that the college must create situations which require students to participate in presentations or interviews.

Teaching English is a bigger challenge in non-urban areas where the greater responsibility lies on the institutions to ensure that students are trained better. As per a study released by Aspiring Minds, an employability assessment company, students in non-metros scored lower than those in metros in all parameters of fluency, pronunciation, spoken English, vocabulary, grammar, voice modulation and active listening.

Murugavel, who also conducted a survey among 1,500 non-English medium students who entered engineering courses, found that more than 50% did not read English material other than their textbook nor have watched English TV channels.