Developing oral communication skill in Bangladesh

Competency in Oral Communication has become the most spoken issue of Bangladesh in the recent years (Brunfaut, T., & Green, R., 2017). English Language is no more the communication medium for the English only; it has achieved the status of the official or the dominant language for above two billion people in more than 60 countries. In a short period of time, English received a wide geographical coverage and become one of the leading means of communication. In line with the present competitive world, Bangladesh is not an exception. In the country, English continues its domination and expansion as the highly demandable and an inevitable language. People who have a very sound communication skill in English, especially of spoken English, are in the triumphant march. However, the way of increasing this oral communicative competence for the students of Bangladesh, is indeed a very crucial and burning issue. Despite acknowledging the great importance of this language, our students have not reached to that required level. Only ‘mutual intelligibility’ or ‘mere communication through English’ cannot be considered as competency in speaking. Even the students entering the tertiary level have a very poor knowledge in English Language. This paper, therefore, goes through the present scenario of communicative skill especially speaking skill of today’s students and the existing methods of developing this oral communication skill in Bangladesh. In doing so, the researcher collected survey data from 50 students and 10 Teachers from 3 different schools of different geographical locations, data from 30 students’ and 6 teachers’ interviews. Significant innovations are also found from the practical observations of 3 English language classes of three different institutions. The paper, thus, attempts to diagnose the reasons behind the students’ incompetency, and to propose some new strategies to overcome the language barriers.