Abstract:
Due to the establishment of multinational firms all over the world, people from different
countries have more opportunity to work together. The most important skills needed
to work in multinational company is oral communication skills. Ironically, employees
often face problems in English speaking due to many reasons. Hence, this study aims
to find out the attitude of employees towards the usage of English oral communication
at workplace as well as to analyse the causes of oral communication problems at
workplace with colleagues and English speaking clients. This study focuses on the
employees of Vale Malaysia Minerals Sdn Bhd. The factors of problems involved are
oral communication skills, intercultural communication, communication apprehension
and motivation. In this study, the Statistical Package for Social Science was used to
analyse the data. Questionnaires were distributed to 66 employees of Vale Minerals.
The results of this study indicate that employees at Vale minerals have positive
attitude towards the usage of English at workplace; however, employees often
encounter problems when speaking English. The problems are caused by unknown
word meaning, lack of ability to adapt to different culture, shyness and seldom usage
of English. It is recommended, that the next research should widen its research area
based on district.
