Workshop on improving communication skills in Vijayawada

Vijayawada: P Gopichand and P Nagasuseela, associate professors of the Department of English, J K C College were invited by Prof Dr R Sivarama Prasad, Department of IBS & DCM, ANU, to hold a workshop for M Com students on 'Improving Communication Skills through Technology.' In our education system, many give least importance to pronunciation. Our students face problems in MNCs and when they go abroad for higher education. In our one-day workshop at ANU, we played clippings where the pronunciation caused a lot of misunderstanding.

An Italian man went to Malta and in the restaurant his pronunciation caused too much of confusion. Thus, we advised the students to brush up their pronunciation. We also made them do the drilling of IPASounds, vegetable vocabulary, animal vocabulary, music vocabulary, restaurant and tools vocabulary. To break the ice, we showed the clippings of useful expressions along with the conversations of 'Asking and Giving information'. Songs like 'Jingle Bells' and 'Riders on the Storm' boost up their confidence levels when we made them sing along with the videos. After familiarising the students with the sounds, vocabulary and songs, we introduced short dialogues in the situations like, at the airport, at the hotel, at the mall, at the railway station.

Finally we played the song 'Cheap Thrills' and suggested that we can learn pronunciation, vocabulary, sentences and short dialogues with songs, where learning becomes pleasure.