Graduates' Employability and Importance of Communication Skills:

A Study on Public Universities in Bangladesh

Abstract

English has been included in the education system of Bangladesh for a long time. However, after getting twelve years education in English, learners average competency in spoken English at tertiary level is not yet up to the standard which is a consequence of negligence of teaching speaking at every level of education (Imam, Ropum & Arif, 2013). Unlike the private universities, the public universities of Bangladesh hardly give emphasis on communication skills to make the students able to compete in the job market. Consequently, graduates are found to have problems in communicating in English and they feel shy to speak in English (Azizul, 2010 in Tahereen, 2015) and often in the job market their communication ability fails to impress the interview board. This paper aimed to find out are the public universities offer any Spoken English course and to what extent communication skills is given emphasis on the other compulsory disciplinary courses. Two public universities inside Dhaka had been selected to find out the answers of the central research questions. Interview questions for the teachers and classroom observation checklist have been used to collect data. As a theoretical framework this paper has used Brown and Yule's framework of three types of speech (1983). It is found that in public universities most of the departments do not offer specific spoken courses and even they do not give any emphasis on spoken skills on other disciplinary courses which create adverse effects on graduates' employability.