Thomas Zachariah 

Life Skills & English Language Coach @ BICS | Public Speaking-CRM-Placement Expert | Pep Talker | Corporate Trainer.  E-mail: [email protected]

Update yourself or ready to be outdated is a life truth in the current challenging scenario for everyone! To be precise more on this update your skills is the choice and the other one is sure fate if you do not go for updating your expertise. Being a coach for Communicative English/ Business English for the past few years, and that is too from a non-native English speaking country like India, it is my belief that I have to equip every day myself more into this language to impart the system of language to my learners authentically and convincingly. Or in other words, I have to make use of every single opportunity to enhance my knowledge in this area of teaching. There are certain reasons behind the quest for updating.

As a non-native speaker of this language, the main challenge in my teaching is to help my learners to synchronize with the socio-cultural implications of English language. Otherwise many expressions were alien to them. So I came to understand that here I need more authentic knowledge from authoritative people or organizations from the native lands at least from the UK or US. Otherwise, it is really a hard thing to make the learners to understand certain features such as word stress and intonation in speaking, which are not in Malayalam, my mother tongue.

Next major issue I have been facing in my coaching career is handling the negative strokes like the fear factor in my students. Most of them, no matter even if they are highly qualified academically, are hesitant or shy to speak in this global tongue. You may have many reasons to consider English as a universal language for communication mainly of its political connotations but for me the real fact for achieving this hyped status mainly because of the easiness of this language in its acquisition. But the slavish mentality or showing undue respect toward the English language makes this language acquisition a tough deal. This is a special scenario in Kerala, my state, which has a claim as the most literate state in India. Our students are really afraid to speak up or they are afraid of making mistakes while speaking English. Indeed they do not want to make mistakes. If they speak, they firmly believe that there would be mistakes. So they want to be quiet or speechless though they have a real desire to speak English. This feature affects them seriously to settle in a decent career even though they are academically good. To build confidence in them is a challenging affair in my sessions. Hence I have been including more fun activities in my classroom. In fact, it is a place for me to come with innovation like make your story from the given clues or allow them to speak with masks as it is shown in the above picture.

More than these issues, to bring them more language activities to catch up the nuances of this language make me weird many times. My learner-centered sessions are mostly activity based. Always I am there to mix up my life skills expertise with my language acquaintances. Yes, it is working as a rare blend to improve the efficacy of the language imparting.

As a language coach, we have to consider one more concern, most of the activities designed by native speakers of this language are not fit into our context or they have to undergo a stringent customization process. This is also a great challenge in my career.

To sum up this writing, it’s my conviction that to face the above-mentioned challenges, it is inevitable that we have to equip ourselves every day and is a key to establish my niche as a language coaches otherwise we will be no more in the picture. Update yourself is the only choice before you otherwise it is your fate, not a choc at all you will be outdated.

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