 Welcome friends to this very new and exciting course called English for Engineers. I am your instructor Ayesha Iqbal Vishamohan. I am a professor of English at Department of Humanities and Social Sciences here at IIT Madras. This course as you know is part of IIT's initiative for distance learning the NPTEL program. So, what is this course all about? As is written on the board this course titled English for Engineers is going to entail the four important skills of the English language. Listening, speaking, reading and writing you are also going to get or become familiar with the nuances, the sub categories of these skills such as report writing, presentations, writing an essay, taking down notes, grammar, vocabulary also various other writing activities and reading comprehension activities that you may require on a day to day basis. So, in other words you will learn how to communicate in everyday classroom situations. Essentially the course is for those who are doing undergraduate studies in engineering sciences. However, those who want to improve their overall communicative abilities will also stand to benefit. Apart from the essentials of grammar and vocabulary the course will help you with effectively communicating ideas and expressing yourself in various oral and written situations. You will also learn reading comprehension and skills such as skimming, scanning, note making and summarizing. You will also learn the structure and presentation of formal letters, emails and also research and construct a CV that is designed to meet the requirements of a particular job application additionally. You will learn how to prepare a successful presentation, thinking about your audience, organizing the structure, making effective use of visual and other aids and deliver the presentation. You will learn how to write academic reports, the structure of a report, making appendices and bibliography. The course will also teach you about writing essays and papers. As part of this you will learn how to generate ideas, research, structure your materials, use quotations and references etcetera. The course duration is 20 hours. You will be tested on the basis of short quizzes, multiple choice questions, fill in the blanks. So, by and large there will not be any essay type questions. However, there will be short type, short questions and for which you will have to submit answers. We are going to tell you the process of submitting answers online once we start the course and start giving you the assignments. So, thank you very much. We look forward to having you with us on this course.