Effective Oral Communication In English Language

Effective oral communication in English language has become mandatory for academic success at the level of higher education. Students, when they are in the job market, are assessed, evaluated and graded only by their speaking skills. Developing speaking skills is invariably one of the challenges and responsibilities of teachers of English at higher educational institutions. Hence, it is the need of the hour for teachers of English to find out innovative strategies to motivate the students to enhance their speaking skills in English. Counselling is taken as a significant strategy by the researcher to identify the problems and to solve them through motivation of the students to participate in speaking skills development programmes. Having identified

In such class rooms, only a very few students are able to speak and respond in English. The students are even not participatory in the oral exercises in English. Hence, when students are required to speak, they are unable to exhibit or express even personal information about themselves in English, and they become frustrated and show reluctance to participate in oral communication in English. The main reasons for their frustration and reluctance to take part in speaking activities include lack of motivation, lack of teachers’ understanding of the learner’s level of speaking before the speaking skill training programme, and lack of opportunity for the teachers to use diagnostic tools to find out the entry level problems of the students in speaking skills. Moreover, students rarely speak even in their own vernacular language in public performances like seminar presentations in the class, oral competitions, acting in English plays, etc. So, the students in the class feel very strange, nervous and anxious to participate in speaking activities in English. When students are asked to communicate in English, they feel afraid to speak, and many of them express a common response that they have nothing to

Class room management, syllabus completion, time constraint and less effective teaching methods are a few of the factors. As a result, students who can speak well in English, lack the opportunities to enhance their speaking skill, and the average and below average students struggle to speak a few sentences in English on their own. When these students get enrolled in higher education, with some expectations to develop knowledge on the subject they choose, they are expected to speak fluently in different situations such as seminars, oral presentations in the class, and conversation with teachers, peers and administrators. Such requirements reveal the significance of teaching basic speaking skills in English. Thus, it is very important for the teachers of English to try to use various innovative strategies to teach their students speaking skills with utmost care. The present study focuses on using counselling as a strategy and its impact on students to motivate them to participate in speaking activities in order to make them enhance their speaking skills in