Technical Oral Presentation: Analyzing Communicative Competence of Engineering Students of Pakistan for Workplace Environment

Abstract

Communicative competence plays significant role for engineering students to perform various oral communicative tasks efficiently at workplace following graduation. The respondents for this study were twenty five engineering students who participated in this study from two engineering universities of Pakistan. This study employed purposive sampling method since respondents were drawn on specific criteria of only final year engineering students. The instruments used for this study for data collection purpose were recording of oral presentations to capture communication strategies employed by engineering students to overcome communication deficiencies during oral presentations. Data were analyzed qualitatively using strategic competence framework of Canale and Swain (1980). Additionally, Dornyei and Scott’s (1995) compiled Inventory of Strategic Language Devices was used to explore the types of strategies that engineering students employ to overcome communication deficiencies when they face any communication deficiencies. Open coding (Richards, 2005; Strauss and Corbin, 1998) was used to code the oral presentation data. The results of the study revealed that engineering students used three communication strategies namely message reduction, code switching, use of fillers and self repetition strategies to overcome communication deficiencies during oral presentations. The findings of the study can be used as a guideline to focus strategic competence of engineering students to prepare them productive engineers for modern industry.

Keywords: Communicative competence, Engineering students, Workplace environment