International Journal of
Innovation, Management and Technology

Abstract

Ever since the course of business communication forced itself to sprout out as an individual branch from its mother branch, HRM, the evolution of its teaching has become a landmark in management education and the challenges we face in getting it right in the 21st century have been immense (Du-Babcock, 2006). This paper attempts to discuss business communication as a course since its genesis and the future challenges in its teaching. Apart from this, the paper identifies evaluation of students of this course as major challenge. Time and again various stakeholders have emphasized on the possession of both verbal and non-verbal communication skills with the business management students (Gray, Ottesen,Chapman and Whiten, 2007) and while business communication syllabus across Indian business schools is a balanced mix of both written and non-written skills, the evaluation pattern, across the globe, is such that there is little provision of assessment on non-written skills. Hence, though the non-written modules of the business communication course do get taken up, there is little evaluation upon them, thus leaving a sense of incompleteness not only in terms of instructor and the course delivery but also in terms of students having a feeling of acquiring the said skills. This paper attempts to explore certain efforts that have been made to address this challenge and identifies certain focal points to be considered, if and when, evaluatiomn practices in business communication are redefined.