Abstract

In the 21st century, mastering English language helps fresh graduates to cope with workplace communication in any situation There are four language aspects that attributes to communicative competence (Canale & Swain, 1980). The most important is competency in grammatical and sociolinguistic which are needed for successful communication and, importance in promoting and portraying their capabilities especially during employment interviews. However, most of the fresh graduates fail to impress employers when they could not even comprehend the basic interview questions asked by most employers. This shows that not only their proficiency of the English language as a tool of communication is poor, but above all, they neglect to see the importance of successful communication. This inability leads to social and economic drawbacks, in relation to job attainments. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how the ignorant attitudes towards the importance of mastering English amongst the fresh graduates is one of the major causes of not securing jobs in Malaysia. An in-depth interview was conducted with a sample of 35 Human Resource Managers from well-known organisations in Malaysia. A semi-structured interview protocol was used in this study to find out the reasons of the incapability of fresh graduates to land jobs. The findings show that most of the fresh graduates who attended the employment interviews could not comprehend the basic questions asked in most interviews. They were not able to answer questions accordingly and oftenly, the answers given were misinterpreted by the interviewees because of their inappropriate choice of words, incorrect sentence formation, lack of pragmatic competence, and misinterpreting questions. This indirectly shows the lack of English language competence among fresh graduates. There can be further investigation into learning language and behaviour skills to develop certain communication skills. Fresh graduates are invited to participate in blended learning to enhance their English language proficiency. The Government has also implemented the Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) to create more job opportunities by 2020 and this will benefits graduate who have a good command of English. Most organisations may request fresh graduates to show evidence of English proficiency apart from having excellent academic qualifications