AS AN APPROACH TO HONE ORAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS THROUGH PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH (PAR)

Abstract

There is a surprising metamorphosis of the ‘language teacher’ in 20th century to ‘facilitator’ via ‘skill trainer’. The reason behind it is to stir and motivate the language learners’ and equip them with skill set. Generally, language learners require skills in all the four skills for better presentations in and outside the class rooms. The major objective of the course is to prepare the students with all the needed skills by using their wisdom of knowledge to get success at the end of the course. Keeping this in mind, the researchers applied the Group Discussion activity with participatory action research method in the present paper to enhance the listening and speaking skills of engineering graduates. Through this PAR method it is observed that the engineering graduates with rural background and vernacular medium need more emphasis and intensive training. In order to carry out the program, the researchers prepared a module to overcome such hurdles by continuous practice, observation, application of fish bowl technique in GD. While assessing the learners, the performance of the learners transformed from generic to specific in every round of presentation paying attention to one to one critical observation. The result of the research is quite satisfactory and it gives an encouragement to the language teachers to strengthen their students by applying the method.