Thank you again for your detailed post!

What an amazing dilemma you bring up – that the corruption of the English language is not discernable even in lectures.

Languages are like that – if you don’t use them you lose them. As we used to say in the military, it’s a ‘perishable’ skill set.

Happy as it is for those concerned, the more one knows of correct English, the more uncomfortable one is with this trend. As the lyric goes: “I’d rather hear a choir singing flat.”
I once, this was back in 1996, sat through the lecture of a man who had his prepositions, conjunctions, and even some verbs confused. Every sentence he uttered was ambiguous and confusing. But what was really interesting was that the rest of the class had no problem understanding him. This was because their English was at the same level as his. Instead of saying, “The way the compiler handles this is that it allocates a block of memory to hold the value of the variable,” he might say something like “The way the compiler handles this is because it allocates a block of memory to hold the value of the variable.” For the others the wrong word ‘because’ did not pose a problem, but it threw me off course.
So too we have a growing audience of people who cannot discern between correct and incorrect English as long as the material is intelligently arranged and easily navigable.

Because of India’s large population, one would also be able to find many who write correctly or are in the correctable stage. The problem is not the unavailability of the good, but in the need for weeding out the others. Of course, as pointed out, the others will also probably find their corner in the field.

As for children left behind by the Indian educational system, it depends on what your vantage point is. For poor children in a village or a slum, the corporation schools provide their only hope for a better life. Many children from these schools do much better than their parents. But if we compare their education to ours, they are left behind. But these children will not even hear about technical writing.

For our purposes we must focus on those who come out of English schools in the big cities. An average student from any of the many good English schools in places like Bangalore, Chennai, New Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Poone, and so on, is a potential candidate for technical communication. I am not sure of what you have in mind when you say post-secondary, but it will have to be after the tenth standard or high school. Another point to note is that unless the qualification is a degree offered by a university, it is not likely to interest Indians. we have an obsession for university degrees.

Those are compelling points. One of the issues that I thought so easy to fix was in the level of schooling. I appreciate your candor with the “Speak and write correct English” or not crowd.

Your comments are a tremendously great “eyes on the ground” level of information for my analysis. What you’re saying is that, even if the students pass the English testing, they may not retain the proper skills.

My mom, a California lifetime certified English teacher has told me similar things as well. Her concerns are always about the skills developed through our schooling, and whether or not certain curriculums “Leave Children Behind“.

If I’m reading you correctly, it seems that the majority of India’s children are in fact, left behind. Additionally, the minority of children are well educated, and the very elite obtaining the global educational skills required to compete in the technical writing field.

I speculated recently about whether India’s technical writing resources could be enhanced by targeted and specific career based schooling. I posted my comments on Sarah’s Palimpsest blog, however her blog’s archives aren’t allowing me to find the article.

Let me be the first to say, I based that assessment on a limited view that the base level of education provided a similar launch platform for post-secondary education. Based on what you’re relating, there is an even smaller portion of India which receives this education than what we realize.

For my India research I’ve used the World Factbook and other resources. I bet that test you told me about has some sort of research statistic attached to it – number of people or such. However, if even graduates of that course of study are not able to speak English, where could I look to find stats on how many may be able to compete in Technical Communication?

Another thought that comes to mind that is not related to learning. Many of the technical writers you might meet in an online forum or an STC conference in India belong to an elite group. Although it sounds silly, and no one may have even noticed it before, I suspect that you will find that most of them have had their schooling in good schools. But at the grassroots level, things can be very different. When I taught Technical writing, I came across many kinds of students. So also, when we were trying to fill a position for technical communicator in a documentation team, which was incidently doing work for a well-known software company in the US, I interviewed a large number of candidates. Cruel as it may sound, you have the ‘Can speak correct English’ type and the ‘Cannot speak correct English’ type. The success of a person in a field such as technical communication is related to one’s familiarity with the English language.
A sufficient grasp of English of the kind that IELTS tests for is not sufficient for our purposes. With a person who says, “ABC is a company that develops software and export to International markets,” and you ensure that it is not a typo, you have a long and tedious struggle ahead before you correct this and all the other mistakes that this mistake is indicative of. (Such a person may sail through the IELTS testing system.) Thus a carefully designed English test is essential to eliminate those whose grammar is not easily correctible.

Your second question about Web 2.0:
If you can convince management of the need for a wiki, you have won half the battle.
You would have to also ensure that the users understand the purpose of the wiki enough for creativity to kick in. Four or five years ago, I worked in a smaller firm (of the ‘smaller startup of really smart software engineers’ kind) and was introduced to wikis. At the time, I did not understand what it was about and resented having to trade my comfort with Frame with troublesome tags and a sandbox. Unfortunately where I work now, the first half of the battle with management hasn’t been won as yet.

Nahomi Dhinakar’s latest musing..How does one get into a relationship with Jesus?

Would you attribute the different learning styles to anything particularly Indian in nature, or is this just an offshoot of traditional learning styles that people have globally (visual, auditory, written, etc.)?

Another question – where would you place the usage of Web 2.0 elements such as a wiki within collaboration refinement in an Indian corporation?

I think that given the large number of attempts being made, chances are that someone will have great success somewhere or other, and soon if they haven’t already.

I also think that India will never become the Eutopia where a general refined pure state of collaboration will work. Apart from the points already mentiones, here are some things that come to mind.

India is so complex that it is going to be terribly difficult to subject it to any kind of analysis. You will need 25 different firms, not four, to even begin to predict anything.

I have worked as a Technical Communicator in four firms, taught Technical Communication in two institutes, and met several other kinds of firms during my stint as a contractor. But the dynamics of every new environment was always so very different from the ones before.
The extent to which things like caste mattered differed greatly from firm to firm,and from city to city. So did the values of people.

In a sense, differences of dynamics is true of any firm anywhere. But we are talking about collaboration, where we need two groups of people to understand each other and work with a seamlessness that can be documented and replicated.

My kids study in Auckland, and I now understand how different our Indian way of learning is. Thus the availability of e-learning opportunities of a global standard will not necessarily benefit the Indian user in the same way as it would a Western user. This is not to say that the Indian learner is in anyway inferior. Just different. Ah, and not just different from the western user, but different from other Indian learners.

Indians can and do produce quality work, but one must not take for granted that the behaviour of a group in India would be the same as their western counterparts. It is as easy to err on the the side of an excess of rules as it is on the side of inadequate guidance. However, one must not expect the balance that works well for one firm to work for the next one.

Any working paradigm caters to some differences that get factored in. However, as far as outsourcing in India is concerned the model needs to include substantial processes for finding out differences and making the necessary adjustments for them.

Nahomi Dhinakar’s latest musing..How does one get into a relationship with Jesus?