Dear All It has been a fascinating week or so of discussions on this important issue. Several very useful practical suggestions have been made – many of which we would like to consider for our training programme at NCSI. Some thoughts based on my experience with NCSI training programme. I think there is a strong case for introducing a formal course in communication (English) and other soft skills in L&IS courses and training programmes. As part of a 1 credit course on communication skills (IS 210) we have included in our training programme (see http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/training/courses.html), we had experimented with a faculty from our Foreign Language School in IISc, specializing in scientific/technical communication, teaching English communication skills and presentation skills to one batch of trainees. We did see appreciable improvement towards the end of the course. Unfortunately this faculty has left IISc and we are yet to find a way of regularizing this course. We also have a formal 1 credit course (IS 249), in second semester, called ‘Seminars’ (see above URL page). Trainees are given select papers and are expected to give presentations after studying these. Apart from these, each instructor also makes the trainees to give ample number of presentations based on assignments. NCSI alumni association (NCSI-NET) also organizes occasional guest lectures on communication skills/ personality development as part of its monthly meetings in Bangalore. While these are a few of our efforts, we still have a long way to go in getting these efforts to produce consistently good results. I think it should not be difficult to introduce a formal 1 or 2 credits course in L&IS programmes in universities since most universities have full-fledged departments in English/ Journalism/ Mass communication. Nice to see this being done at Mysore University. British Council conducts exams and provides training material related to Business English. I believe they also conduct English proficiency exams for corporate employees. Is there someway we could get British council to conduct a few workshops for L&IS teachers? I think there is much scope in this area. I remember several workshops on scientific/ technical writing skills used to be conducted a few years back. Mr. Arunachalam (of MSSRF, Chennai) used to be an instructor a few of these courses. Could these be revived? Practice of some instructors to apportion some marks for correct use of English in the exam papers is a very useful one (something most secondary/ high schools do!). I wonder if this should be a mandatory feature in L&IS programmes. As we all know, language is something that is learnt more by practice. I find many students are either shy or scared of speaking, worrying about making mistakes. In as much as it is in their hand to overcome this, it is also the responsibility of the teachers (and fellow students) to encourage such students, instead of making fun of them (verbally or through body language). I know couple of our trainees, who were quite poor in communication, made very good progress simply by being bold and not afraid of speaking (and making mistakes). I agree with Ms. Nagarathna that in the final count, the onus is on the student – doing well should come from within – instructors can provide opportunities, directions and feedback based on their performance. Also, does it make sense to encourage students to spend some time reading English literature (e.g. fiction)? Though such reading habit is usually picked up in younger age, we also know that this is one easy way of improving English usage. There is lots of very useful self-learning material available online on this topic. I feel we should prepare a good gateway site pointing to quality learning material. On our training site we currently make available tutorials and self-learning material related to technical topics (see http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/training/Tutorials.htm). We can easily extend this to communication skills related material. InfoLibrarian site could also host such material. Finally, a word of caution about pushing McLuhan’s saying ‘Medium is the message’ too far. We should avoid emphasizing this message too much, lest our students begin to think that ‘form’ and ‘style’ is more important than ‘content’ and ‘message’. Certainly message/content should be the prime focus (‘Content is king’!), and not form and style. I feel employers should avoid assessing potential employees based only on their communication abilities. We know competencies vary – some are good in ‘doing’ and relatively poor in expressing. We need to recognize this and find the proper mix of job and worker competencies. Regards Rajashekar ------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. T.B. Rajashekar Associate Chairman Tel: +91-80-23600271, 23601427 National Centre for Science Fax: +91-80-23601426, 23600683 Information (NCSI) E-Mail: raja@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Indian Institute of Science URL: http://144.16.72.189/raja/ BANGALORE-560012 (India) ------------------------------------------------------------- SciGate: http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/ The IISc Science Information Portal