FOSTERING GENERIC SKILLS IN A LANGUAGE CLASSROOM FOR GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS

The need to develop generic skills for effective competition in today’s world has become imperative. To carry out this study, a descriptive survey design was used to determine how a language teacher can help to develop generic skills in the students. A group of teachers of the ‘Use of English’ from the sampled universities (University of Nigeria, Enugu campus 12, Nsukka campus 28 and Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu 15) was used. The total number being 55 was used because it is a small population. The study is therefore designed to find out the specific generic skills that should be emphasized by the English language teacher and to find out what methods/strategies that can be used by English Language lecturers to foster generic skills inherent in language lessons. A 28 item questionnaire was the instrument used for data collection while analysis was by means and standard deviations. 2.50 was the accepted mean and anything below it was rejected. The results showed that many generic skills can be fostered through proper teaching of English language and recommendations were made.