Drawing on a synthesis of Halliday’s [2] triad construct of context of situation in systemic functional linguistics and Douglas’ [3] construct of discourse domain as a theoretical framework alongside the Specification of Generic (Foundation) Competencies (English) (SGC) [4], the analysis found that the numerous specific communicative events (when studied in conjunction with the contextual details) derived from the data, such as replying to email/telephone enquiries, handling complaints, writing reports and proposals, taking part in discussions and meetings/negotiations, giving presentations, etc., are of various levels of complexity and familiarity and require language output of different levels of sophistication. Upon systematically mapping these real-life workplace communication tasks with the corresponding units of competency (UoCs) in the SGC according to the language skills/competency elements involved and the QF levels into which these tasks fit, the majority of these communicative events were found to cluster around those UoCs that are covered in the English curricula of the various VTC programs. This lends substantial empirical support for the relevance of these English modules to the generic language competencies needed in the actual workplace.
Examples from the analyzed data will be used to illustrate how details of these real-life workplace communicative events, especially contextual dimensions including the subject matters, participants/interlocutors and modes of communication that essentially determine language use, can be translated into actual pedagogical tasks for vocational language training, particularly within a framework of outcomes-based teaching and learning[5], and how this facilitates the constructive alignment between the intended learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities and assessment tasks of the existing SGC-based vocational English modules.
