Towards an understanding of the Communicative competence of students pursuing Business Management courses in Bangalore

Abstract

this researcher teaches in a Business management school which is driven by the philosophy of Inclusivity in Higher Education and believes that everyone deserves access to quality education and equal opportunity. Therefore, graduates aspiring to get into Business Management education are taken into the program where the criteria for admission is guided mostly by the candidate s interest, aspiration and passion towards the program and not so much by elitist or exclusive considerations. Students bring along intellectual and cultural capital, however being able to communicate fluently in English language is not always met. One of the reasons for this is that the student population is drawn from very diverse backgrounds, from urban, semi urban and rural parts of India where they would have very limited access to spoken and written English. Though they are strong in their domain knowledge, students lack ease with communication. The environment in a B-School is slightly intimidating for many, where students are suddenly challenged to use the English language more frequently to demonstrate their reasoning ability, analytical ability, and logical soundness in arguments while participating in classroom discussions, debates, seminars and presentations. If such is the challenge within familiar activities of interaction for students of BC, one can only imagine the barriers newline4 newlineto communication that these students would face while interacting with people from different geographical locations and diverse cultural expectations when they enter the business world. newlineAs a teaching faculty teaching BC courses, this researcher has observed that students despite challenges in their language skills, still manage to a certain extent to communicate successfully. This teacher hunch made the researcher delve into finding out whether there were other aspects of communication at work that might have been helping students communicate, despite their limited linguistic ability. newlineAn attempt to find some answers to these queries, led this researcher to survey literature related to English Language Teaching (ELT) and Sociolinguistics. The notion of communicative competence caught the attention of the researcher, leading to a detailed study of all the four aspects of Communicative competence and this was followed by a pilot project to examine what aspects of this competence contributed to students communication effectiveness. newlineThe outcome of the pilot study triggered further curiosity in the researcher and it was felt that here was a worthy niche that could be investigated as a full-fledged Classroom ethnography taking the researcher towards an understanding of the communicative competence of students pursuing business management courses in Bangalore. newline