The bilingual bluff

• Why Sri Lanka Must Stop Mistaking English Fluency for Professional Competence  
• A short workshop or an isolated English course will never fix the graduate communication gap; our universities must embed industry-specific rhetorical training directly into the core curriculum to stop leaving educational justice to chance.  

Many Sri Lankan graduates exit universities with acceptable English grades yet remain entirely unequipped to navigate real-world professional communication. Studying in an English-medium environment does not automatically produce effective workplace communicators. To bridge this critical employability gap, higher education must move away from fragmented, remedial language courses. Instead, professional communication must be established as a non-negotiable national graduate attribute, structurally woven into the assessments, rubrics, and distinct disciplinary practices of every degree.   

• “The problem is apparently not linguistics alone but rhetorical, disciplinary, cognitive, and institutional—more English instruction is not the same as better professional communication.”
• “Studying through English does not automatically produce effective speakers, writers, presenters, or negotiators. Exposure can support learning, but exposure without structured support may also hide inequality.”  
• “No graduate attribute becomes real unless it is duly assessed. If communication appears in policy documents but not in rubrics, assignments, and viva voce examinations, students will learn that it is less important than examinable content.”  

This series began with a simple concern: many Sri Lankan graduates leave university with acceptable English grades yet struggle to communicate effectively in professional settings. The first article identified this graduate communication gap. The second traced its roots to assessment and curriculum structures, especially the way tests shape teaching and learning through washback. The third argued that the answer is not simply more English teaching, but communication systems across the curriculum. The fourth moved the discussion from policy to classroom practice.   

This final article of the series asks a broader question. If professional communication is central to employability, research capacity, workplace performance, and national development, should it remain a concern of individual English courses, or should it become a serious national graduate attribute?   

Sri Lanka already has the policy language needed for such a shift. The Sri Lanka Qualifications Framework supports outcome-based programme design and recognises communication as part of graduate capability (University Grants Commission [UGC], 2016). Quality assurance processes also require universities to demonstrate the relevance and quality of educational provision (Quality Assurance Council, 2023). In engineering, the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka links accreditation to programme outcomes, quality assurance, and professional comparability (Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka [IESL], 2021). These frameworks create space for communication to be treated as part of graduate quality, not as a remedial language issue.   

However, policy recognition does not always become student experience. Students meet the real curriculum through what they do: reports, projects, presentations, examinations, internships, laboratory work, viva voce assessments, and final-year research. If these tasks do not require clear explanation, evid  

ence-based reasoning, audience awareness, and revision, communication remains a stated value rather than a learned competence.   

Why Fragmented Reforms Fail

Sri Lankan higher education often responds to communication problems through fragmented remedies. A short English course is added. A soft-skills workshop conducted, a presentation inserted into a module are typical solutions they make. These efforts may benefit, but they rarely change the deeper learning culture unless they are connected to curriculum, assessment, feedback, and disciplinary practice.   

This is why I argued via this series of feature that “more English” is not the same as better professional communication. A student may receive more English instruction and remain unsure how to explain an engineering design, justify a business decision, interpret a graph, write a technical report, or respond to questions in a viva. The problem is apparently not linguistics alone but rhetorical, disciplinary, cognitive, and institutional. Professional communication requires students to know what counts as evidence, how arguments are organised, how audiences differ, and how knowledge is presented within a field (Hyland, 2004; Hutchinson & Waters, 1987).   

Recent English-medium instruction research strengthens this argument. Rose et al. (2026), in their systematic review of EMI studies, show that EMI can support receptive skills and vocabulary, while outcomes for productive skills remain more mixed. In other words, studying through English does not automatically produce effective speakers, writers, presenters, or negotiators. Exposure can support learning, but exposure without structured support may also hide inequality.   

The policy-practice gap is of equal importance. Sahan (2021) shows that EMI policy does not automatically translate into consistent classroom practice. Wu et al. (2026) also show that students in EMI contexts may report gains in reading, speaking, and vocabulary, yet continue to face difficulties in lecture comprehension, academic writing, classroom expression, and heavy reading tasks. The lesson is clear: communication reform must work at policy, programme, and classroom levels.   

What National Alignment Should Include

If professional communication is to become a national graduate attribute, Sri Lanka must define it carefully. It should not mean English fluency alone. It should mean the ability to use language for disciplinary and professional action: explaining knowledge, interpreting evidence, presenting decisions, writing for specific audiences, collaborating, responding to critique, and adapting communication to context.   

The second requirement is assessment alignment. No graduate attribute becomes real unless it is duly assessed. If communication appears in policy documents but not in rubrics, assignments, project evaluations, laboratory reports, internship assessments, and viva voce examinations, students will learn that it is less important than examinable content. Washback research has long shown that assessment influences what teachers teach and what students value (Alderson & Wall, 1993). A national commitment to professional communication must therefore reward clarity, coherence, evidence use, audience awareness, reflective revision, and the ability to explain decisions.   

The third requirement is programme-level ownership. Each degree should identify the communication genres that matter in its field. Engineering may prioritise technical reports, design explanations, data commentaries, safety documentation, and project presentations. Business studies may prioritise proposals, market analyses, negotiation, professional correspondence, and decision briefs. Medicine, law, agriculture, computing, architecture, and the social sciences will each have their own communicative demands. ESP research has consistently shown that effective language support begins with learner needs, disciplinary genres, and target contexts (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987; Hyland, 2004).   

The fourth requirement is lecturer development. Professional communication cannot be built by asking subject lecturers to become language teachers, which is unrealistic. However, lecturers can be supported to make the communication practices of their disciplines visible. They can show students what a strong explanation looks like, how evidence is interpreted, how a report is structured, and why one presentation persuades better than another. ESP specialists and subject lecturers can work together to design rubrics, feedback practices, writing tasks, and oral communication activities.   

Sri Lankan Proof of Possibility

Sri Lanka does not need to begin from a blank page. Local examples already show how professional communication can be built into learning more intelligently.   

Recent work at the University of Moratuwa has been useful in this regard. The Communication Skills Development Programme for engineering freshers found that many students did not simply lack basic English. They needed stronger support in higher-order academic and professional literacy: synthesising information, explaining technical ideas, responding to questions, working collaboratively, and communicating under real-time conditions (Karunarathne, forthcoming). This distinction matters. If the diagnosis is wrong, reform will also be wrong. Students who need disciplinary communication support should not be treated only as remedial grammar learners.   

The same logic appears in ESP and assessment reform work. Alternative assessments such as professional documents, interviews, presentations, peer review, and reflective writing show how assessment can move students from passive task completion toward more deliberate communication practice (Karunarathne & Rathnayake, 2025; Rathnayake, forthcoming). Such work supports a larger point made throughout this series: assessment is not merely a way of measuring learning after it happens. It is one of the strongest ways of shaping what students understand learning to be.   

Local initiatives such as ESAP-Engineering and Academic Literacy for STEM Studies also suggest a practical pathway. They recognise that students entering English-medium STEM education need structured support in academic reading, writing, presentation, research literacy, and reflective learning. More importantly, they show that such support can be designed as part of the transition into disciplinary learning, rather than as an afterthought once students begin to struggle.   

From Pilots to Systems

The difficult question is how such local practices can become part of national higher education culture without becoming another bureaucratic checklist. Sri Lanka has often been good at naming reforms. It has been less successful at sustaining the everyday conditions that make reforms meaningful.   

Scaling must therefore be handled carefully. A successful initiative in one university cannot simply be copied into every faculty as a ready-made model. Communication is discipline-specific, institution-sensitive, and student-sensitive. What works for engineering freshers may not work in the same way for management, medicine, law, agriculture, or computing students. The principle can travel, but the practice must be adapted.   

A national framework should avoid two extremes. The first is over-centralisation, where all universities are expected to follow the same model regardless of discipline or student profile. The second is fragmentation, where each institution experiments without shared standards, evidence, or accountability. The better path is guided flexibility: national expectations should define what graduates should be able to do, while universities and programmes should decide how those outcomes are developed in their contexts.

Equity must also continue to be a primary focus. Students enter university from unequal linguistic and educational backgrounds. A system that assumes English-medium exposure alone will develop communication may reward those who already had stronger opportunities before university. A system that teaches, practices, supports, and assesses communication across the curriculum gives more students a real chance to grow. Formative assessment research shows that feedback, peer review, explicit criteria, and reflection can strengthen learners’ ability to monitor and regulate their own learning (Wafubwa & Csíkos, 2021). In Sri Lanka, this is not a minor teaching technique. It is part of educational justice.   

Making Communication Count

A serious national approach cannot be left to universities alone. Employers, professional bodies, accreditation agencies, and quality assurance systems all influence what universities prioritise. Employers must move beyond saying that graduates “lack communication skills”. They should specify what is weak: report writing, technical explanation, meeting participation, client communication, negotiation, documentation, or oral defense.   

Professional bodies can make communication visible within accreditation. Quality assurance reviews can examine whether communication is integrated across the curriculum, whether students receive staged practice, and whether assessment evidence supports the claimed graduate outcomes. The UGC and national quality assurance structures can encourage discipline-sensitive communication outcomes without flattening differences across fields.   

The central question, therefore, is not whether Sri Lankan graduates need professional communication. That has already been answered by universities, employers, students, and the realities of work itself. The more important question is whether Sri Lanka is willing to treat communication as seriously as it treats technical knowledge, examinations, and accreditation.   

For too long, communication has been handled as a support problem. When students struggle, the answer is often another English course or another workshop. These responses serve a purpose, but they are incomplete. Communication is one of the ways graduates demonstrate whether they can use knowledge.   

This series has therefore argued for a shift in thinking: from English grades to professional communication, from isolated courses to curriculum systems, from policy statements to classroom practice, and finally from institutional pilots to national graduate attributes.   

A country that expects its graduates to innovate, research, negotiate, lead, and compete globally must give them the communicative formation needed to do so. Professional communication is not separate from national development. It is one of the conditions through which knowledge becomes useful, employability becomes meaningful, and higher education fulfils its public purpose.   

The writer, W.M.P.Y.B. Rathnayake is the Head of the Department of Languages, University of Moratuwa