- Title
- An investigation into the listening and reading comprehension of a heterogeneous group in a management development programme
- Creator
- Cowley, Gillian Ann
- Subject
- Language arts - South Africa, Communication in business, Listening, Second language acquisition - South Africa, Language and education - South Africa, Language and culture - South Africa, Reading comprehension - Ability testing
- Date
- 2012-08-17
- Type
- Mini-Dissertation
- Identifier
- uj:2634
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10210/6080
- Description
- M.A., South African companies, faced with the challenges of keenly competitive global and domestic markets, must reconsider their foci and methods of staff training and development. Political pressures to address the imbalance of power in local workforces by activities such as affirmative action also mean that the skills, knowledge and attitudes of employees must be improved. The Management Development in Afrox Training Programme, developed and conducted by Afrox Limited, is targeted at the company's supervisory level and forms part of the company's affirmative action policy. This level of employee reflects the heterogeneity of the South African population and comprises persons of diverse language and cultural groups and educational levels. An investigation into the listening and reading comprehension levels of the delegates found that the majority of them are not equipped to cope with the complex language used in a typical management development programme. An understanding of sophisticated Western business concepts, encapsulated in English for Specific Purposes, is not successfully transferred to the delegates and results in a failure to deliver the desired outcomes of the course. Based on the findings of the research a number of recommendations have been made. These have application not only to the Management Development in Afrox programme but to business programmes which are currently not meeting the needs of their South African target groups because of linguistic elements which confound the planned learning process.
- Contributor
- Prof. H. Kroes
- Full Text
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