Workplace communication: oral communicative competence of engineers in engineering workplace of Pakistan

Abstract

Communicative competence plays important role for engineers to perform workplace jobs efficiently in this wide spread business environment of organizations. The respondents of the study who participated in oral presentations were six engineers from 2 engineering workplace of Pakistan. Purposive sampling method was used for data collection purpose. Oral presentations were video recorded to capture communication strategies employed by engineers to overcome communication deficiencies during oral presentations. The data were analyzed qualitatively using strategic competence framework proposed by Canale and Swain (1980). In addition, Dornyei and Scott’s (1995) compiled Inventory of Strategic Language Devices was used to investigate types of communication strategies used by engineers to overcome their communication deficiencies during oral presentations. Open coding (Richards, 2005; Strauss and Corbin, 1998) was used to code the oral presentation data. The results of the study indicated that engineers employed four communication strategies namely message abandonment, code switching, self repetition and use of fillers. The findings of the study can be used as a guideline to add communication strategies in engineering curriculum to prepare productive engineers for modern industry.