TWO SHORT BOOK REVIEWS

 

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Syllabuses of a subject like Functional English, Communicative English, Business English, Engineering/Technical English, Legal English, Medical English, or English for Vocational subjects must have an in-built component of regular NEEDS assessment. It is essential to identify specific language skills students need to have for employment (or practice) in conventional and emerging sectors. If language teachers, particularly from Literature background, have to remain relevant for students in a college or university, they must have the right professional approach and attitude to the kind of English that a company or organization looks for in sectors such as Management, Communication , Customer Service, Sales, Design, Automation, Project management, research, analysis, marketing, teamwork, leadership, etc. They need to interact frequently with HRs of the companies that hire their students and revise/improve their teaching contents besides honing their own personal skills to justify teaching what they seek to routinely do.

Language teaching for skills development for a profession cannot be done by simply lecturing. It requires active practicing, learning and re-learning, and then teaching how language is used in a professional discourse, how one receives and interprets written and visual information, how one chooses the appropriate rhetorical function in a context, how one organizes one's thoughts, data or information, using a suitable discourse type or strategy, or how language is used "in a semantically coherent communicative context determined by a complex of linguistic and extra linguistic factors."

Gajendra Dutt Sharma's book on FUNCTIONAL ENGLISH should help one to sensitize students to the task of learning complex skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. He has tried to enunciate clearly the characteristics of the four language functions "with focus on application" and practical suggestions. To ensure that students have followed WHAT Functional English is, Sharma adds "suitable questions related to each skill for practice. "

It is indeed a helpful resource book, but it is ultimately the users who alone can vouch for the success of the author's attempt. With his claim to follow the recommended syllabi of NEP 2020, Dr Sharma's book adds to the scores of available titles in the areas of Communicative language teaching.

--Professor R.K.Singh

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I have not read the New Education Policy: 2020 document yet, but appreciate the importance of language teaching for skills development, whatever the subject.

Ashish Kumar Gupta 's book seeks to provide via definition, description and example a self-help book for understanding WHAT and HOW one thinks out in language, how one dresses one's thoughts, how one presents one's knowledge, or, in short, what the Art of Wordsmithing is. I presume Dr Gupta, as teacher and researcher, understands well how writing means re-writing, with patience and perseverance. His book collects plenty of useful information, worth knowing and sharing, about critical thinking and creative writing, but I suspect the HOW of WHAT, as Dr Gupta describes, is not easily learnable.

The skills of writing to be developed for general/mass media course students are, no doubt, exploitable for students of professional courses as well, but students of Literature need not be taught to write a story, poem, novel, or drama to justify productive literary skills development.

All the same, Dr Gupta's book is a positive help for students and teachers alike who are concerned with the new programmes being implemented under NEP 2020.

--Professor R.K.Singh

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