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Title EFFECTIVENESS OF CUSTOMIZED COURSE ON ENGLISH COMMUNICATION SKILLS FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE STUDENTS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Author(s) SAJIDA BANO

Abstract The importance of English for Specific Purpose (ESP) is not recognized fully especially by experts from technical fields in Pakistan. This weakness, on part of educationists, has created major deficiency in capabilities of graduates which is exposed at their workplace. This deficiency is clearly visible in Government approved curriculum which is being followed in the universities especially for technical degree programs. The major impact of such shortcoming is observed when feedback is obtained by alumni and employers. This study is an effort to identify the requirements in course outline of Communication Skills for CS students and its effectiveness. The study focuses on improving the contents instead of teaching methodology to fulfill the workplace needs of computer science graduates. The study is quasi experimental and it prepares two groups of subjects for the comparison of the effectiveness of two treatments (old course outline and novel course outline). The experiment involves the comparison in the performance of the two groups which are Control Group(for treatment with old course outline) and Experimental Group (for treatment with novel course outline) of size 25 subjects each, at pre-test phase and then at post-test phase. Finally, another comparison, between each group’s two performances, is performed to evaluate how much improvements is made by the groups. T-testis used on the final evaluation score to determine whether the improvement was significant as a result of the treatment. The evaluation was performed by a panel of eight members from different software houses, working at managerial level. The evaluators were kept same for the pre-test as well as for the post-test and they evaluated both groups to ensure uniformity in evaluation in the experiment. The results showed improvement in both groups but the experimental group (treated with novel course outline) outperformed the control group (treated with old course outline) by a significant margin. The t-test value of 4.43x10-7 justified the alternative hypothesis. The results also conclude that Higher Education Commission of Pakistan needs to take notice of ESP’s positive effects on English language courses included in non-language degree programs. Currently, there is no linguist in curriculum revision for computing and engineering degree programs as the list of academicians indicate, and the deficiencies highlighted in this study go unnoticed during curriculum revision. The findings support medical, engineering, mass communication, economics, and business students’ case as well for inclusion of ESP in their courses. Similarly, these are applicable on all regions of Pakistan as the overall country shares similar social and economic status if not the same. In future, this study can be extended to other regions of Pakistan and can be applied to other fields of study as well. Keywords: English for Specific Purpose (ESP), computer science, communication skills, Pakistan.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2020-01-21

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