Factors Influencing English Speaking Performances of Bangladeshi Private University Engineering Students

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to address the influencing factors of speaking skills of tertiary-level learners in engineering studies. The data were collected from sixty students and nine teachers teaching at a number of Bangladeshi private universities – International Islamic University Chittagong, Southern University Bangladesh, and Chittagong Independent University. The researchers followed mixed methods to analyze and generate data. The students were chosen from the freshers of Engineering faculties of the mentioned universities who were involved in different speaking activities such s storytelling, performing presentations, debate, problem-solving, situational conversation, question answering and extempore speech. This research, the topic of which is apparently controversial, explores the learners’ English-speaking competence as well as the influencing factors such as fluency, pronunciation, grammatical range and accuracy, and lexical resources. The major findings of the study include certain challenges in speaking skills such as Anglophobia, lack of an English-speaking environment, syntactic and morphological limitations, lack of lexical resources, and intonation issues in pronunciation. This paper will understandably contribute to the syllabus design and material development of teaching speaking skills to tertiary-level students of Engineering studies in particular.