International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies (IJIMS), 2015, Vol 2, No.9,115-120. 115 Available online at http://www.ijims.com ISSN: 2348 – 0343 Teaching English Communicative Skills to Technical Students: A Case of Difference for English as Second Language and English as Third Language Sweta Sinha Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Abstract Effective communication is the essence of growth and development. The technical institutes in India have special courses designed to enhance and polish the communicative skills of their students. However, it may happen that some students benefit from the teaching practices more than the others. This does not always have to do with attention deficit from the students but the linguistic background of the students many times plays role subconsciously. It is the responsibility of the facilitator/ resource person to identify the students on the basis of the number of languages that they know and make groups where English communicative skills is to be taught as a second language or a third language. The research discussed in this paper presents the findings of four technical institutes where the underperformers in English mainly comprised of such students who were native speakers of another language using Hindi as their second language and trying to learn English as a third language. Proper intervention from the facilitators and the teachers and correct teaching practices can improve the skills of al students alike. Keywords: Communicative skills, ELT for technical students, ESL, English as third language, ELT in multilingual setting, technical communication Introduction Technical communication refers to the activity of preparing or publishing specialized information in such a manner that non- specialists can easily understand and accomplish the task (Graves and Graves, 2012). They point out that in order to make technical communication with the readers effective it is important to consider some of the key- points like “level of experience with the subject matter, their educational background, experience with and attitude towards learning new points and relevant demographic characteristic such as age, sex, race, socio- economic background and first language”. It is worth noting here that especially the first language (FL) of the readers/ users has been given precedence because that has a lot of precedence over the other languages learnt after that. In the present paper this aspect has been discussed in detail not just for users/ readers of technical communication but for those engineers and scientists in making who would produce such technical writings.The growing tendency towards globalization and modernization has left one and all for an urgent need for a perfect and homogenous medium of communication. It has become essentially important to be in consonance with the ongoing inventions and discoveries to keep pace with the intended growth and development all around the world. It goes without mentioning that the most common and the most suitable language for this purpose is English. The knowledge of English opens up immense opportunities for individuals to explore the fruits of science and technology among others. It enhances the comprehension capabilities of various types of academic books and research journals. It empowers the individuals to express and share the ideas and thoughts with the outside world. Or putting simply, it gives the power to understand and to be heard. With so much importance attached to English, the role of a teacher or a resource person becomes highly invaluable and pivotal. The task of an ELT (English Language Teaching) specialist becomes easy when the class s monolingual or