I came to India in order to access its workforce and I expected that all college graduates have strong language skills in English. After I spent a couple of months, I found that Indian college graduates have a lot of potential to become great workforce; however, they need some training when jobs require them to speak and write in English competently. Especially when they work for companies headquartered in US, UK, Australia and Canada (and other English speaking countries), the training is mandatory. The followings are areas in which they need some training.

Indian college graduates tend to write incomplete sentences and make many grammatical mistakes. Also they omit commas, periods and apostrophes. They often forget to capitalize certain letters, too. When they are instructed to not make those mistakes, they make a lot less mistakes. Also in most cases, they can find mistakes that they make. However, some training is definitely needed in this area so that they write properly subconsciously. All courses in college are taught in English expect for language courses like Hindi, Chinese and Spanish, but after all, they are not used to speak and write in English as a part of their daily life; this is probably the reason why they make mistakes that even they recognize.

Another common problem is spelling; more specifically, too many words are spelled in the way that they are often used in chartrooms and text messaging. While they understand that they cannot use spellings used in chartrooms and text messaging when they write official documents, they subconsciously use those spellings because it is a habit. Some training is needed in this area also.

Generally speaking, if they can write while they make few grammatical mistakes and make few misspellings, they can handle most tasks in English, but once they take senior positions such as managers and consultants who directly work with clients of American nationals and British nationals, they need to be able to convey what they intend to inform very clearly in their writing. Most Indian college graduates lack experience in this type of writing. It is true that even native English speakers need to practice to be good at this type of writing, but that obviously does not imply that Indian college graduates are excused because of that. On the contrary, they need to practice even more to be at least as competent as native English speaker college graduates.

Also Indian college graduates have a recognizable accent. It is not absolutely necessary for them to change their accent, but they should learn how to speak slightly differently. For example, they can speak slowly. They can imitate Americans and British (and other English speaking people). While having an accent is not a technical problem, it can result in a communication problem. It is rather important that they recognize that they are not making any technical mistakes in this regard, but it is also important that they need to change the way in which they speak slightly when they speak with Americans and British (and other English speaking people).

Over all, Indian college graduates have good language skills in English, but they are a bit rough. They have a lot of potential, but if they want to become competitive, some training in English is needed.

J. Watanabe is the owner of Open Online Education Network. OOEN also hosts a discussion forum for learners to discuss learning opportunities including college, university and vocational education.

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