Posted by TCYonline.com on December 31, 2010
XAT-2011 is just a few hours away and tens of thousands of aspirants will be engaged in last minute fever-pitch preparation. Formulae revision, basic conceptual skills brush-up and perhaps last minute preparation for vocabulary, grammar and reading comprehension will be the order of the day. Certainly, there is reason for this flurry of activity as XAT is arguably the toughest entrance exam for MBA programs in India. Nearly seventy affiliate institutions shortlist their candidates on the basis of XAT scores although the test was initially meant for admission only into XLRI- Jamshedpur. Even now, an essay component in the exam is used for candidate evaluation solely by XLRI.
Aspirants across the nation will be both dreading and anticipating the result of XAT-2011. Fortunately, they will not have to wait for the final result to get a fair idea of how well they have done. TCYonline.com, India’s premier online test prep platform, will be helping students out of the agonizing wait by solving the XAT-2011 test paper and hosting the answer on the website. The responses will be available on the website by 4.00 p.m. on the day of the exam itself. Students across India can not only compare their responses with the correct answers, but can also know of the attempt pattern of thousands of other aspirants. With the right responses of thousands of candidates in all the three sections being input, a rough idea of the XAT 2011 cut-offs will also emerge on the homepage of XAT 2011 analysis on www.TCYonline.com.
For more information, students can log onto http://www.tcyonline.com/exam-analysis/xat-2011-solutions for further details.
All of us at Team TCY wish the aspirants of XAT a very Happy New Year and the Best of Luck for XAT-2011.
Posted by Iris Devadason on July 3, 2010
Questioning Text (Authority): Strengthening Reader Identity.
by
Iris Devadason.
At Post-Graduate level, Reading should not be a receptive skill but should be as productive as writing is. Teachers should provide various aids to introduce the idea of reading as interaction between the reader and writer, a recognition of the writer’s voice.
Questioning a text before and while reading it is to many a new idea as students have always been questioned after reading a text where the emphasis is only on recall of content and not on anticipation or “on making intelligent guesses”.
Why do I make much of this technique ?
Questions are the prerogative of parents-teachers, doctors, counselors/pastors
and police personnel, lawyers and judges .But readers too need to ask: What is the author actually saying which is not just surface content?
Thus, Questioning text opens up new interpretations of thoughts and facts. It allows the reader to assume a new role as authority, a new identity as reader. Of course questioning as a method is not new and we all know of the Socratic method which is about teaching by asking, instead of sheer telling .
Our graduate students are usually passive, a kind of tabula rasa, waiting for the teacher to fill their minds with information. This is a cultural trait more common in rural areas where the teacher as ‘guru’, is a formidable figure whom one must not question. This attitude of respect and fear of the teacher is reflected in the way students avoid eye contact with the teacher. Such students have to be taught how to question a text. The idea is new to them. I now offer a few of my practical solutions to this problem.
1) I cite Kipling’s poem ‘Six Serving Men’ to substantiate the idea of questioning being an important skill.
“I keep six
honest serving men,
They taught me all I knew.
Their names are
What, why and when
How, where and who.” [Rudyard Kipling ]
I then give out copies of a simple text to read, normally taken from a magazine. I encourage them to start with basic questions of Literal comprehension those beginning with the Wh-words: What, Who, Which, When, Where and also How and Why, though these are deeper questions.
Students wonder how they are to ask questions if they have not read the text and so I help them with obvious pre-reading questions like, ‘Who wrote this Article ?,’ ‘When was it published ?’, ‘What does the author say of—-? actually activating latent knowledge.
The fact that they do not have to answer these questions but just frame them is a new idea which they have to accept and practise for their future study.
2) Classroom work: This is followed by practice with skim and scan type reading, asking all the Wh-questions . For the weaker students I re-teach the structure of the question in English as our students often make statements and then add ‘Yes?’ or ‘No?’ or by voice inflection convey their query. I also point out that questions may begin with prepositions as in the following examples, ‘ In what way ..?’ ‘ From where did ….?’, ‘To which person….?’To practice this skill I ask questions such as:
‘When did Holi/ Id/ Christmas fall last year?’ and ask what question is implied in it.
Answer: On which date did we celebrate Holi/Id/Christmas?
I allow ten such samples going around the class to ensure that all have understood the power of questions and their structure too. This takes about two hours to teach and home work is given to reinforce learning.
But I do keep the WHY and HOW questions till later as they are deeper questions.
The underlying rationale is that all students have experience of life but they are unaware of what they do know. The teacher helps them to bring out latent knowledge in them and helps them to bring this into play while decoding unfamiliar text. They are forced to be active participants and thus shed their earlier passiveness due to cultural inhibitions and dominating teachers!
3) I now introduce to students sophisticated tools of questioning based on Barret’s Taxonomy, which is itself based on or related to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.
These are:
Question types Bloom’s Objectives
- 1. Qs. Of Literal comprehension Knowledge
- 2. Qs of Personal response Comprehension
- 3. Qs of Re-interpretation /reorganization Application
- 4. Qs of Inference Analysis
- 5. Qs of Style Synthesis
- 6. Qs of Evaluation Evaluation
This requires a lot of practice. I allow homework which is not graded but corrected and discussed . Grades are awarded only when they have mastered the technique .
These question types are related to different levels of learning. The first two levels are acceptable for high school or pre-university students but for PG students the others are more useful as they foster good readers and critical thinkers. Making connections with real-life scenarios by inferencing and predicting too has to be encouraged in such students.
Asking questions is thus a way of instilling confidence in students who have never been permitted to think for themselves and be critical. It turns diffident students into bright scholars who interact with learning materials with high returns. Both socially and academically, asking questions is a very useful tool and I heartily recommend it to other teachers. ©
Questioning Text (Authority): Strengthening Reader Identity.
by
Iris Devadason.
( only 893 words now)
Posted by girish seshamani on
OBJECTIVE
The first reaction of all professionals whenever I used to mention the importance of Accent Neutralization was one of sarcasm and smirk.
When I interacted with these professionals at length, I found one point in common. They were technically very sound in their function. Moreover they were proven performers. But somewhere down the line, the growth stopped. They probably never realized this or probably did not sit down and introspect where they should have been and where they are right now.
As we are all aware, the English Language has become the lingua franca linking businesses across the globe. So it becomes all the more imperative to be fluent in our speech. Fluency is a combination of many factors put together.
Fluency includes your pronunciation, intonation, and use of the right words, flow of language and the rate of speech.
Drawing from my experience of working with multinational organizations,
I have without exception, seen professionals at all levels, having a very limited vocabulary. Moreover the use of colloquial expressions and slang is on the higher side, which makes them look totally unprofessional.
Effective Communication is very simple to define. The target listener should understand the message, in the way you want him to comprehend. If there is a mismatch here, the very purpose of communication gets lost.
Professionals, who rise up the hierarchy very fast, are without exception excellent communicators.
Indians have a very strong regional influence while speaking. In professional parlance it is called as the Mother Tongue Influence (MTI)
When people speak with a very heavy regional accent, people get distracted because the pronunciation is not clear and the class aspect is lost. The net result is your image gets spoilt. I have seen umpteen cases, where professionals have a good vocabulary, but unfortunately their heavily accented English coupled with the rate of speech creates a huge barrier in the communication process, and their reputation also taking a beating.
Neutral Accent is nothing but globally understandable and comprehensible English Language. This means that a person from any part of the world should be able to understand what you are speaking without having to strain him or interrupt you.
People have this wrong notion that they need to imitate a certain accent, as in, American Accent or British Accent. There is absolutely no need to imitate any accent. Your English should be devoid of regional influence.
When professionals speak, using the right word, with excellent pronunciation, intonation and the ideal rate of speech, people perceive you as a classy person and you command lot of respect. Likewise, a very heavy accented pronunciation, puts off the listener, and thereby the very purpose of communication is lost.
Business today is very fast paced, and in order to survive and excel in this cutthroat competition, it is of utmost importance to articulate in diction, and, be globally understood.
Comprehensibility is therefore the ultimate focus.
Now I come to the most critical part. All MBA programs talk about lot of skill sets being developed over a period of two years, but no one talks about the importance of Neutral Accent. Moreover during the selection process, Neutral Accent becomes a very critical skill which is assessed, irrespective of the industry. Lot of people have the misconception that Neutral Accent is confined only to the BPO industry, which is totally wrong. Neutral Accent is not industry specific. It is an essential requirement across all industries and more importantly one of the most critical skills if you want to move up the hierarchy.
Your voice is the means by which you convey your inner thoughts and feelings to the outside world. It is the outward expression of your inner self.
The English language, its structure and the accent or dialect changes from country to country. Hence, it is very critical to speak in a globally comprehensible English dialect.
In the second part of this article, I shall cover the problems faced by Indians and the steps to be taken to come to a Neutral Accent.
