I work with an engineering college in a remote area in Andhrapradesh. Most of the Engineering colleges in this state are affiliated to JNTU (Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University). In order to make the students future ready, the university introduced ELCS (English Language Communication Skills) in first year and AECS (Advanced English Communication Skills) in third year of the four year B.Tech course. The university made it mandatory for all the engineering colleges  affiliated to it to open an ELCS Lab. After the introduction of English in the curriculum the demand for skilled English teachers shot up. But I don't think there is enough supply of skilled and knowledgeable English teachers to meet the demand.

Students who join the rural colleges are found to be very poor communicators. In our college the students remain silent in English classes. Most of the time the teacher speaks and the students remain passive listeners. Some students don't even pay attention. When a teacher asks a question they just rise to their feet and stare at the face of the teacher till the teacher asks him/her to sit. A few of the students either nod their heads or simply utter a monosyllabic answer "yes". If they want to say 'no' they just shake their head(as its has been the local custom showing disagreement). The teachers who are really committed to their profession and entertain a genuine desire to bring about improvement among their students, these acts really make them feel frustrated.

Whenever I seek to know the reason behind their passivity they quote the reason of being Telugu(vernacular Language) medium students. But even in Government run schools English is introduced at 5th standard. That means they receive eight years of instruction of English before they join their undergraduate courses. Eight years are a long time and a student who pays the required attention should be able to acquire reasonably good ability to use the language. But that is not the case. Most of the students who fall under this category don't even pay attention in the class and look clueless of what is happening in the class. The main reason behind their behaviour is they hold a negative attitude towards English. They think that since they studied in in their mother tongue they can't, in other words they don't have the ability to acquire it. This negative attitude makes them feel uninterested in the language. But at the same time I observed that they entertain a strong desire to acquire fluency in English. But they feel that it is way beyond their reach.

There are some concepts like Teacher Talk Time and experts tell us to keep the TTT to minimum and make the students speak more. When we try this students don't  open their mouths.  After a prolonged prompting some students come forward to speak a few words. But the college authorities are very concerned about the poor communicative abilities of the student community and pressurize the English teachers to do more to bring about improvement. They have their own problems. There is growing competition in the  education industry and recently the union government opened the doors even to foreign universities. Campus recruitments are considered to be one of the benchmarks to judge the quality of education in a college. When the corporate organizations visit the college on a campus recruitment drive the students grow nervous about their ability to communicate as it is their Achilles-heel. In spite of being good at their specialization they find themselves not competent enough to put across their ideas in job interviews and as a consequence, struggle to find suitable opportunities.

So as an English teacher I face one question persistently from the student community as to how to improve communication skills in English? They want a short cut method to improve their language skills. But I don't think there are any short cuts. In search of short cut methods they visit spoken English Institutes which teach English through vernacular. So at the end of the course they end up improving their mother tongue instead of acquiring English. Chomsky's generative linguistics say that language is innate and genetically hard wired into our brain and there is something called LAD which works only till the children acquire puberty and is not available beyond eight years of age. So acquiring a Second Language is always going to be difficult for the adults. So prolonged exposure to the target language that enables the organs related to language processing and delivery  to internalize it is the best way.

So to those students who approach me with the question, I tell them to give more experience to their sense organs in dealing with the language. We use our eyes while reading, ears while listening, speech organs while speaking and manual dexterity and cognitive abilities while writing something.  Of course the speech organs are not considered to be part of sense organs and manual dexterity is only an ability. But when the students who want to acquire  a new language they need to provide these organs more exposure so that they can gain experience. Experienced eyes can skim through the text and comprehend it at a rapid pace, experienced ears can make out what the native speakers speak while they watch television on which  native speakers  feature the most. When they provide their speech organs with the required experience they can not only articulate things in a better way but even speak the language fluently. The manual dexterity they possess enables them to use their hands skilfully and put their thoughts to paper in a legible manner.

But does this prescription really work? We all think that our brain is the seat of intelligence. How the organs acquire the experience and operate on their own even when the brain in not active? The genome biologists say the idea that brain is the seat of all the intelligence is obsolete and as a matter fact the whole body is full of intelligence. They say in every cell there is a nuclei and inside the nuclei there are molecules and these molecules contain genetic information, that is DNA. So this DNA is passed on from one generation to another generation. So this makes things clear that brain is not the only place where intelligence is concentrated. So the organs that were mentioned above can be properly trained to enable them to internalize the language skills. So extensive and intensive practice of LSRW is vital to the internalization of English.

Well these are only some ideas that struck my mind, but we have still a long way to go before we find an ideal and effective method to impart language training to the students.