Teaching of Foreign Languages for Engineering Students in Indian Contexts

Introduction

The tremendous advancements in science and technology has made the world shrink and the people of the world are ‘linguistic relatives’, as languages play a pivotal role in making the global community share their thoughts and ideas beyond horizons. Study of foreign languages has become an added value in the successful journey of the aspiring and ambitious students towards their vision and mission. In all leading institutes in India, teaching of foreign languages has acquired new dimensions in terms of methodology and pedagogy. VIT, being a competitor of world class universities in terms of innovations in teaching, teaching of foreign languages has its own uniqueness. The author, in this paper, in order to standardize and globalize teaching and learning of foreign languages, presents the concerted efforts put forward by him in order to serve the purpose as meaningfully as possible.

Methodology Adopted In Teaching Foreign Language

Members of faculty, Department of Languages, VIT, being professionally dedicated, constantly involve themselves in employing innovative approaches and methods to make language teaching as effective and as meaningful as possible. Eclectic approaches are also experimented, thus engaging learners with knowledge and skills required to meet the challenges in the global market. The Department is constantly working on providing a dynamic, congenial and intellectual environment by fostering critical, reflective and conceptual thinking in learners, and aims at enriching the language abilities of the learners by adopting unique, relevant and need-based approaches to learning. Different approaches and methods are adopted in accordance with the understanding capabilities of learners, and Dr. N.S. Prabhu, an international researcher of repute in English Language Teaching (ELT) rightly observes through his research that no specific approach or method can be considered the best, as far as language teaching-learning is concerned. For learners from initial to advanced levels, different approaches and methods need to be adopted in order to enable them to move from better to some stage bettering the better and progress to a stage that could be considered best to their intellectual capacities. Integrating international perspectives into its teaching, the Dept, with a strength of 18 members of faculty well-specialized and well-experienced in teaching foreign languages such as French/ German/ Spanish/ Arabic/ Chinese/ Japanese, besides teaching of regional languages such as Tamil and Hindi lures the attention of learners from a wide range of cultural and economic backgrounds, and provides a rich and diverse teaching-learning environment.