Investigating the relevance of teaching general communication skills for vocational programmes in the context of Polytechnic level education in Singapore

The launch of the Industry Transformation Programme (Ministry of Trade and Industry, n.d.) led to the start of the new initiative, SkillsFuture that sparked a series of changes in funding for training schemes, programmes in professional training and relooking at the role of technology and automation in the professional environment in Singapore. In response to this change, the institution of this study introduced a set of fundamental communication subjects which aims to prepare students to be effective communicators in the workplace. This research investigates issues the researcher identifies in the list of fundamental communication subjects and questions the need and possibilities of teaching general communication skills in vocational-based programmes. The method for this study includes semi-structured interviews, surveys, and discourse analysis of target texts. In addition, I evaluated the role of context in teaching written communication skills by examining the importance of and aspects in a specific genre existing within the early childhood education professional environment - teacher lesson plans. The findings confirmed the complexities of transferring general communication skills across dissimilar contexts and suggest that communication skills for the workplace should be taught within, if not close to, authentic environments. Recommendations included the introduction of varied contexts and genres existing in practice within the curriculum, possible collaborative efforts between language and learning experts with discipline-specific teachers and guiding learners on how to learn genres.