ABSTRACT
English language proficiency is an essential requisite for the graduates, apart from their technical, analytical, and problem-solving skills. An engineer requires speaking proficiency in English to give oral presentations in conferences, meetings, and seminars in front of higher officials or colleagues and to build strong relationship and better understanding among fellow students and peers. The need for English communication has become indispensable for an engineering candidate to meet the demands of the corporate and industry. The chapter presents the significant requirement of English in the engineering curriculum. The chapter advocates the need for speaking proficiency for the engineering graduates. The chapter explores the possibilities of facilitating learning strategies through pedagogical strategies in improving the speaking proficiency of ESL learners. The participants of the study chosen for control and experimental group have been the first-year civil engineering students comprising 38 in each group. The teacher-researcher of this study has applied Dornyei’s (2001) motivational strategies in administering the oral communicative tasks (OCTs) in the classroom and in making the learners employ learning strategies while performing the tasks. The pedagogical strategies have been customized by the teacher-researcher catering to the needs of the participants of this study. It has been found in the study that 32 strategies have been employed by the learners to participate in the classroom interaction and to accomplish the OCTs. The ‘t’ Test has been computed to compare the performance of the students in control and experiment groups. One-way ANOVA has been computed to find out the significant difference between the use of learning strategies of the experimental group with respect to the implementation of pedagogical strategies. The results have revealed that there has been a significant level of improvement in the oral proficiency of the experimental group. This study elucidates the pertinent and challenging role of English teachers in improving the language proficiency of their learners in ESL context.
