Chapter- 5

Summary and Conclusion

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 CHAPTER 5: SUMARY AND CONCLUSION

5.1 Introduction

As this fifth and the final chapter has been titled, ‘Summary and Conclusion’, we will
revisit some of the key points discussed in the previous chapters and will try to reassert
and reiterate points and elements of critical importance in this study. This study focuses
on the problems (challenges) that the students belonging to varied cultural, social and
linguistic background face primarily in two aspects of (English) language- Oral
communication skills and Verbal Aptitude. This research tries to zero-in the potential
variables which subdue those challenges and enable a student to perform in class-room
situation and also in the achievement test(s). The research also aims to find out those
variables, in contrast, which cause these challenges.

5.2 Revisit to the chapters

The thesis has been planned in five chapters- Introduction; Literature-review;

Methodology and Data-description; Data Interpretation and Analysis; and Summary &
conclusion. The highlights of the important points from each chapter, up to chapter-4, will
be presented in the increasing order.

5.2.1. Chapter-1 this chapter presents the intent, content, aims and scope, purpose,
relevance and significance of the study, wherein the researcher begins the chapter by
defining some of the key points of the thesis. The researcher also tried to find cover-term
for some of the important elements of the study. As the research deals with the
communication challenges of a particular group of students with specific reference to
English language, we have also given some space to the discussion on English in India
and Indians’ English, and some of the important names associated therewith. The next
section of the chapter deals with the expectations of the corporates out of their
prospective employees in terms of oral communication skills and Verbal aptitude. In fact,
there is also a detailing on the exact existing framework of some of the prominent
recruiters at the university under-study. Finally, towards the end of the chapter there is a
discussion on framework for the present study.

5.2.2 Chapter-2 The second chapter of the paper reviews some of the very important
works which are in line of the present study, in order to find out the work(s) already done

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and also to explore new perspectives, if any, that could be applied on the work in order to
strengthen and solidify the study. There is also a very brief discussion on some of the
models of and approaches to language learning and teaching. Some of the prominent
theorists and their game-changing theories have been given due space in the research. The
next step of the research begins with the discussion on Chomskian dichotomy of
competence and performance and its refutations and rebuttal by Hymes, Habermas and
many more prominent scholars and their positioning on this issue of competence also
finds space in this study. Some of the models of communicative competence have also
been discussed in somewhat details in order to find out which one of them is the
encompassing most which could capture the utmost essence of this study. The models
discussed therein were by- Canale and Swain (1980) & Canale (1983), Bachman (1990)
and Palmer (1996), Halliday (1978), Celce-Murcia (1995 & 2007) among others. After a
careful study of the existing models and proposed frameworks thereof the researcher was
not thoroughly convinced with these frameworks and decided to use an eclectic method
which could get him navigate the data, its description and the analysis.

As discussed above, the researcher also tried to look into the Hymsian and Habermasian
theories to find an account for the kind of ‘communication challenges’ the researcher
specifically talks about in the present study, but again the definition of the communicative
competence by these two and also by a few others wasn’t found accommodative enough
to be able to accommodate the communication-challenges of BICS and CALP, especially
the data which was arrived at by administering NRT and CRT tests on the subjects or
participants of a particular study. Thus, for the purpose of the study, all the
communicative acts have been terms as ‘languaging’ (adaptation from Swain, 1985).
Towards the end of the chapter the researchers talks about BICS and CALP and NRT and
CRT and their relevance to the present study.

5.2.3 Chapter-3: The third chapter of the thesis presents the methodology used for the
data gathered, kinds of the data, the how and why of the data-elicitation and its form of
presentation in the study. Next, the chapter details of the questions comprising the
questionnaire, the rationale of the questions asked in the questionnaire and the data a
particular question aims to draw. There is also a detailing on the qualitative data gathered
through classroom observation, which is followed by a detailed description of the
numeric data collected through the questionnaire administered at entire 141 subjects of

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 the study. The data has also been presented in graph and chart as and when the researcher
felt the need of, in order to represent the data clearly and unambiguously.

5.2.4 Chapter-4: The forth chapter of the thesis which is the largest of the all is the soul
of the thesis and it presents the data-interpretation and its analysis, with vivid details. At
first the chapter begins with the description of the qualitative data which has largely been
gathered through observation by the researcher himself in the formal academic domain,
though some of the data has also been recorded and presented from semi-formal domains
of communicative acts. A major chunk of the qualitative data comes from the observation
on the linguistic aspect of the challenges faced by students. These linguistic challenges
comprise the challenges, with specific reference to BICS and CALP course, of sentence
formation/syntax and also that of the vocabulary. The other aspect of the qualitative data
was the challenges on the level of prosodics, wherein the researcher takes note of the
limitations of the subjects on the level of pronunciation, pitch, stress, tone, pause etc. and
finally in the final section of the qualitative data there is a description on non-verbal
communication challenges, which included analyses of the subjects’ limitations in using
proper eye-contact with the audience, using positive gestures and postures, the use of
space in formal and informal domains and finally a brief discussion on the aspect of
pragmatic politeness in the view of turn-taking and overlapping. In analysis, it was found
that the students from non-English instruction background, because of the non-exposure
sound impolite though not intentionally. They are found taking turn at inappropriate
junctures during Group-discussion and other class-room discussion activities. Such
students were also found doing overlapping more often than the English medium school-
grad counterparts.

Having discussed the qualitative data in hand and having made an overall observation on
a couple of variables, we moved on to the larger chunk of the data which in fact creates
the backbone of this entire study. To reiterate, the number of total participant subjects in
the study was 141, which were from 2 different branch of Engineering, namely-
Computer Science & Engineering (76) and Mechanical Engineering (65). Out of these
numbers there were 24 female students, 20 from CSE and 4 from ME branch. This
quantitative data has been presented in two ways:

I. Individual data of a subject with respect to her/his performance in BICS and CALP in
both class-room setting and also in the achievement tests. These performances were

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 mapped with the subject’s socio-economic background and also that of her/his
schooling. In the case of individual data-presentation subjects’ self-assessment about
her/his linguistic proficiency in LSRW skills in both English and Hindi was also
presented.
II. Out of overall data of entire 141 subjects, top 35 of BICS and CALP and bottom 35 of
BICS and CALP was presented and analysed on the variables of Gender, Place of
schooling, Medium of schooling, Frequency of use of English at different stages of
life, Branch of study and their native place.

The summary of these analyses will be presented below so that a comprehensive overall
picture of the communication challenges and the particular reason(s) thereof could be
identified. The findings will be located in some of the scholastic works done earlier in the
field and will be seen whether the findings are in consistency with the earlier ones or they
present a different outlook altogether. The chapter will finally talk about the limitations
with the research and scope for further explorations in the area, which will be followed by
the recommendation to the stake-holders of the study so that it could make a positive
impact in the field of study, particularly in BICS and CALP.

5.3 Observation on overall class-room assessment

The qualitative data discussed in chapter-4 of the thesis gives us the following
impressions:

- There are some students who fail to make their mark in the class-room performance
because of their limitation in basic interpersonal communication skills, despite being
good at some other aspect of the language skills.

- A student bereft of training on non-verbal mannerism in early days of schooling, takes

longer than usual to learn the non-verbal mannerisms.

- More focus on prosodic component of language is required. May be, in the first year of
course some component of prosodic requires to be added in order to develop the students’
understanding on this very crucial aspect of language.

- As the students particularly from non-English medium school, require specific drilling
and training on non-verbal cues, turn-taking, overlapping etc., for such grads some

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optional not for credit course could be offered so that they could freely acquire these
skills without much of peer-pressure. Such school-grads may also be essentially
encouraged to participate regularly in the extra and co-curricular activities organised by
clubs on the campus, that will help them get due exposure and learning.

- It’s also responsibility of an instructor to identify such students who refrain from
participation in any discussion in the class-room. They need to be duly promoted &
motivated to participate in such discourse mandatorily.

5.4 Observations from the quantitative data

5.4.1 from Individual Data-Analysis

The self-assessment of the students about their own linguistic proficiency in LSRW skills
was not found consistent with her/his actual performance in BICS and CALP. In fact, in
this reference, the observation of Cummins (2009: 23, 24) about academic language
proficiency is very apt. he says, “The language abilities required for academic success are
very different from those operating in everyday conversational contexts. Sustained
development of academic language proficiency across the grade levels requires expansion
of vocabulary, grammatical and discourse knowledge far beyond and what is required for
social communication.”

i. Through the analysis of the data it comes to fore that the data arrived at through the
observation of the students’ performance in class-room situation is in consistency with
that of their performance in BICS and CALP.

ii. As far as the students’ performance in BICS and CALP is concerned, it has
consistently been found that acquiring skills and scoring marks in BICS is relatively
much easier to acquire and to score. This finding is again in consistency with the findings
and claims of earlier works. (cf. Canale & Swain, Cummins (2009 etc.)

iii. Another observation from the individual analysis section is that the Reading
comprehension (RC) section is a challenge for the students from both English and non-
English medium instruction background alike. RC which otherwise should be the easiest
thing to do, troubles the students greatly. Why it should be easier is because it is the only
question-set which has its answer right there, and why it becomes difficult for the

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subjects, has multi-facet reasons: the text not from their area of reading, lesser exposure
to reading/less reading of texts other than core areas of the study, novel/strange
words/expressions as well as the negating conjunctions such as- however, nonetheless,
nevertheless etc. negate whatever has been said earlier. Because RC also tests the time-
management, many of the students in order to save time tick the option as soon as they
find answer to the question without reading the entire text ignoring the
however/nonetheless part of the text.

iv. The ‘exposure’ in specificity with reference to one’s native place doesn’t really seem
to be working positively as far as an individual’s performance in BICS and CALP is
concerned. If we look-back at the data-analysis on the variable on native
place/geographical location, we find that 2 of the students from Delhi fail to secure any
rank in top 35 of both BICS and CALP, with an average SD of 1.25. And also the overall
composite SD of students from Delhi is significantly lower than that of UP east and Bihar
and Uttarakhand and marginally lower than that of the subjects from UP west.

Interestingly, this observation is in line with the argument of Dasgupta (1993) and
Agnihotri & Singh (2012). Although a further study, with a relatively larger data sample
may be required to say something very decisively. Nonetheless, the composite SD data of
Bihar (which is considered to have inferior infrastructural facilities as far as schooling
education is concerned) indicates that it has by far left behind the performance of subject
from UP west who have an average SD inferior to that of the students from Bihar.

v. It has been found in the individual data discussion section that the age of beginning to
learn and use English doesn’t have a direct correlation with their performance in
achievement tests. There were many students who claimed in the questionnaire, to have
started learning and using English early in their lives but the early start doesn’t seem to
have always materialised in making an individual proficient in English language.

5.4.2. Variable-wise discrete conclusion:

We had identified following variables to map the performance of the subjects with:

a. Gender
b. Place of schooling
c. Medium of schooling

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 d. Frequency of using English at different stages of life
e. Branch of study
f. Native place
a. Gender- Out of 141 total subjects, 24 were female, in which 20 were from CSE
branch and rest 4 were from ME branch. In top 35 of BICS there are 9 subjects
who are female; in bottom 35 of BICS there are just 2 female candidates, whereas
in top 35 of CALP there are 10 female candidates and only 1 in the bottom 35.
There are two interpretations which can easily be drawn-
i. Female subjects are much better than their male counterparts in both the BICS
and CALP.
ii. Female students were found doing good in both the aspects of BICS and CALP
but they are found doing even better in CALP, which is considered to be much
more difficult to gain hold of.
b. Place of schooling:

A huge chunk of the overall students have had their schooling from city. It’s interesting
to note that the performance of the students who have had their schooling from city is
slightly inferior to the ones from town, as far as BICS top 35 is concerned. The subjects
from city have 26.6% share whereas those from town have a slightly better
representation with nearly 28%. The performance of students from town is almost
comparable with that from the metro cities, who have 28.5% representation. None from
the schooling background of villages and capital city, which are total 14 in number
combined, could find place in top 35 BICS performers.

In top 35 of CALP situation is changed and percentage of share of students goes down
from 28% to nearly 15%, and the share percentage of cities and capital cities have gone
up.

These data above on BICS and CALP once again support the claims of Cummins (2009)
that acquiring skills in BICS takes relatively lesser time but acquiring skills in CALP
require a much longer duration and requires much of training.

c. Medium of schooling

The subjects were asked to furnish the details of their medium of instruction during all
three stages of schooling: Elementary, Matriculation or 8th standard and secondary &

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senior secondary (10th & 12th). The data of their scores in BICS and CALP were mapped
with their medium of instruction at each stage. Due to change of medium at some stage or
the other we couldn’t conclusively say something but the data in hand certainly indicated
that the students from English medium background displayed better sense of the language
in both BICS and CALP in comparison to their non-English school-grad counterparts.
And certainly did they display much better performance in CALP than in BICS.

d. Frequency of using English at different stages:

The students while answering the questionnaire were asked to fill in the details of
frequency of using English at different age brackets. And the performance thereof was
mapped with this frequency and we tried to locate correlation of these two, if any.

What comes as conclusion is that for BICS not much of prior exposure is required and a
serious training of couple of years does the work but for the CALP the students require a
much intense and longer training and drilling. There was also another angle to this point
that all of these subjects are from 2nd year of Engineering and they have had a year of
training in BICS in the 1st year of their BTech course.

e. Branch of study

The description on branch of study gives us a very clear impression that the students from
Computer Science are relatively better in terms of their performance in both BICS and
CALP, rather their performance is still better in CALP than in BICS, which in itself goes
to their credit positively. The performance of Mechanical Engineering students is
relatively better in BICS in comparison to their performance in CALP. The analysis of
branch-wise performance was made in terms of BICS and CALP top and bottom 35 and it
was followed by the analysis with respect to the composite SD. It was found in the
analysis that both of these data present quite a similar picture.

5.5 Application of present study in ESP, ELT and scope for further research

- During the study, it was felt that not many studies on this aspect of
communication challenges have been done, which include the data on BICS and
CALP with respect to high-stake Examination.

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 - In fact, there is still further scope for defining the key and cover terms of this
aspect of communication challenges. As it has been shown in the study that the
existing terms fail to account for all the aspects of high stake examination with
specific reference to this study.
- Due to limitation and constraints of limiting the scope of thesis not all the
variables could be taken into account in the thesis. Further study could be taken up
considering the variables of the role of self-assessment, the hows and whys of the
self-assessment, inquiring into their background and correlating it all with their
overall performance. Age was another variable which couldn’t be taken up due to
practical constraints, which again can be taken up for further exploration.
- One of the limitations of the thesis was that the number of the participants from
different places was not equal. There was a steep contrast, that’s why sometimes it
was difficult to make any observation very decisively due to the variation in the
number.
- Similarly, the number of participants from city, town, metropolitan cities, and
villages too was not equal, which was again a limitation with the research.
Although, because of a number of filters, in terms of class-room assessments,
three achievement tests for each BICS and CALP, there was least possibility of
error in marking the performance of subjects but given equivalent number of
participant from different medium of instruction, from different places etc., could
have been better.

5.6 Suggestions/Recommendations to Technical Universities/Institutions:

- Impact of Washback/backwash (cf. Messick (1996:241) should be carefully

studied by the organization. The courses of BICS and CALP may be revised as
and when required by the corporates.
- It has been noticed in the recent past that keeping in view their specific
requirements for particular financial years or in view of the anticipatory
requirements, the corporates change their pattern of NRT and CRT. The
institutions/ universities of such kind (as the one under-study) need to keep a tap
on that as well. However, some of the basic elements of testing, such as- RC, PoS,
Error-correction etc. remains consistent and may be part of CALP and BICS
syllabi right since beginning.

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 - Different syllabi should be designed by universities /institutions for students from
different background and with different levels of exposure. Such courses,
depending on the quality of the intake, may be administered right since the first
year of their courses and developing sense in CALP requires much longer time
than in BICS. So that the students could “[b]roaden their communicative
experiences, their worldviews, and their understanding of the active, creative
roles” (Hall 2016: 117) they are expected to play.
- Almost all the corporates test the prospective employees on CALP through CRT
and BICS through NRT. The institutions of such kind should administer the tests
on similar pattern.
- As the theories on language learning also suggest that a language is learnt best
with peers, the students should be given more and more avenues to do and learn
rather than learn and do. Even the students with limited proficiency should be
encouraged and motivated to handle stage during programs, beginning with
smaller level programs to bigger events. Thus, such students should be able to
“extend [their] language” (cf. Cummins 2009: 34).
- Students with limited proficiency may be assigned senior students as mentors and
they must be encouraged to write for the university magazines and journals. Such
students joining their seniors can create their “Communities of Practice” (cf.
Wenger et al. (2002:7 in Hall, 2016:99)

5.7 Recommendations to Corporates

- The corporates also need to change their outlook towards languaging. This must be
ensured on their part they look for, ‘Engineers with proficiency in and working
understanding of “languaging”’ not ‘Linguists/communicators with limited
proficiency in engineering’2.

- The corporate should also give it a thought to modify their testing methodology.
They should continue testing CALP through CRT but they should certainly test the
prospective employees on BICS through the parameters of NRT.

5.8 Recommendation on Social-scale

2
In fact, during the pre-placement talk of one of the corporates, the senior manager of the company
proclaimed, don’t worry we are not looking for Englishmen, we are looking for people with a decent
understanding of English but the test paper of CALP reflected exactly the opposite.

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 - Society at large and parents in individual must promote the use of mother-tongue by
their children. At least the elementary level of schooling to the kids may be given
through mother-tongue. (cf. Pattanayak, 1991, Agnihotri, 2013)The data gathered
through which questionnaire reveals that parents of many of the students speak to
them in their local language but they prefer to talk to their parents either in Hindi or
Hindi-English mixed language.

- Learning and using English is essentially important and one of the crucial
parameters for survival but it must also be ensured by us that English shouldn’t come
at the cost of the native tongue(s).

- The data also reveals, as the participants themselves claim that they find it difficult
to write using the script of their mother-tongue, particularly- Devanagari and Arabic.
Their self-assessment also indicates that they assign themselves more marks for their
language skills in English in comparison to their skills in Hindi.

- A still higher number of students have reported to be more comfortable using

communicative English rather than their respective mother-tongues.

5.9 Overview of the conclusion:

‘The aspiration of us colonials had been to speak English like Englishmen’- Ved Mehta,
The stolen Light in Krishnaswamy (1998:1). The above line finds a true reflection in the
data which we worked upon in this thesis. We find that the parents even from villages are
sending their kids to English medium schools so that if not much, at least the kid will be
able to speak English. Though as far as the last two words of the statement are concerned,
the researcher feels that the situation in India has changed and has changed for good.
Courtesy the contributions from likes of Agnohotri & Singh (2012), Dasgupta (1993) and
others Indian variety of English has gone on largely receiving acceptance as a variety.
(refer to the chapter 1 for the discussion). Nonetheless, the first part of the sentence still
makes a lot of sense and still relevant.

In this attempt of us “the colonials” of speaking and using English at various walks of
life. Let’s not forget that English has achievement this prominence and popularity (cf.
Chaudhary, 2009 & Krishnaswamy 1998, 2006) due to the opportunities it has created for
its users. So the present study was all about those stops (challenges) which a potential

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Indian employee (who at present is a student at a technical institution) is likely to face in
order to avail the opportunities created by the “Goddess English”.
(http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-12355740).

The challenges subjects face on varied level and their vivid detailing has been presented
in previous chapters but also being a practitioner in the field of ESP, through the
experiences gained being in the field, out of all these steps to availing the pleasure of
“ihloka” (cf. Krishnaswamy 1998:1) CALP is the difficult most of them. As per the
students themselves once they clear the hurdle of CALP, it’s not much difficult to clear
the BICS stage. And even out of the CALP, the questions on reading comprehension give
the students their strongest headache. The students face more challenged in doing
languaging when the medium is changed. The students doing better with paper-pen
examinations are found fumbling, racing against time when it comes to online testing.
While doing RC it is very difficult for not so exposed and Tech-savvy students to scroll
up & down, read the entire paragraph/text and also keep the physical location of part of
text wherein the answer lies, come back again to the question, read it and scroll up again
to look at the text, confirm it and then tick/click the right option.

So the change of medium from paper-pen (offline) to online exam also adds a crucially
important aspect of challenge for them. There are not many students who feel comfortable
reading the things through e-copy, on kindle, laptop, desktop etc.

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