Teaching Written English Communication Skills to the Students of MANUU Polytechnic Using Multiple Intelligence Approach: An Experimental Study

Abstract

This paper is a part of my PhD research, and its objective is to find out the effectiveness of video-based teaching in developing Written English Communication Skills to the first-year diploma students of MANUU Polytechnic, Bangalore. The context of the research is that English communication skills are required for these students to complete the diploma course and to get through job interviews to obtain employment in future. And these students have difficulties in communicating in English in speaking and writing as they are from Urdu and Hindi medium backgrounds. Their one of the difficulties is ‘essay writing in English’, which is taken for the study. As part of the diploma course in the college, these students study all the core subjects in Urdu medium and English language as a compulsory subject. In this scenario, it’s a challenging task for the teacher of English to make the students write essay in English. For this study, Essay Writing in English is taught to these students, and the tools used for this research includes testing of students’ multiple intelligences, conducting pre-test in essay writing, teaching Essay writing using videos selected based on Multiple Intelligence Approach (Howard Gardner,1993) and administering post-test. Finally, data analysis, findings and suggestions will be presented.