College of Humanities and Social Sciences
National Dong Hwa University Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies.No.4
Preparing EFL Learners for Oral Presentations
Preparing EFL Learners for Oral Presentations
Jane King
* BackgroundAbstract Oral presentations, if properly guided and organized, provide a
learning experience and teach life long skills that will be beneficial to ESL/EFL students in all school subjects, and later in their careers (Meloni & Thompson, 1980). In addition, with the availability of technology both at school and home, student-made oral presentations with video cameras, slide projectors, PowerPoint, VCD/DVD and other visual aids could be much more exciting and interesting than traditional ones. Among the many advantages of oral presentations are: bridging the gap between language study and language use; using the four language skills in a naturally integrated way; helping students to collect, inquire, organize and construct information; enhancing team work; helping students become active and autonomous learners.
The communicative approach to English teaching has been very popular in many EFL college conversation classes. Having students give oral presentations in front of the class is one of learner-centered activities that has been widely included in teachers’ lesson plans to improve students’ oral proficiency. However, students’ oral presentation problems sometimes defeat the purpose of developing language skills. Thus, the purpose of this paper is first to discuss the appropriateness of this activity in EFL educational and cultural contexts. Second, oral presentation problems such as speech anxiety, group boredom and the lack of presentation skills are discussed. Third, the teacher’s role in teaching the pre-requisite skills and as facilitator in guiding students through the process is defined. Finally, a step-by-step procedure of how to prepare students for successful oral presentations is presented.
Even though oral presentations have been considered a learner-centered activity in the communicative approach that develops communicative competence. Ellis (1996) questions the appropriateness of the communicative approach in different cultural contexts and the social principals underlying this approach. He argues that the cultural conflicts resulting from the adaptation of a mainly Western approach for an Asian context where both students and teachers had to cope with pressure of examinations and curricular demands. “Unfamiliar activities having a communicative or process orientation were not highly valued by students from traditional backgrounds...a gap between the current level of Keywords: oral presentation, speech anxiety, the communicative
approach, public speaking
Preparing EFL Learners for Oral Presentations performance and the intended learning experience results in a breakdown of language production and frustration for learners” (Ellis, 1996:214). Asian students usually perform more successfully in terms of grammatical competence than in pragmatic and discourse competence. They feel frustrated when they have to use complex academic skills in expressing their ideas in actual performance. Thus, communicative approach needs to be “both culturally attuned and culturally accepted in order to make it more suitable for Asian conditions. It is suggested that ’mediating’ can serve as a useful tool in this process” (Ellis, 1996).
In EFL settings, classroom teachers (Cothran 1995; Altschuler, 1996) raise the question of whether the adoption of a learner-centered approach will be appropriate in a context that is still basically teacher-centered. Speaking in public sometimes actually undermined students’ confidence and is ineffective in developing students’ oral proficiency because students were put on the spot.
Katchen (1991) offers an alternative by using the video camera to improve speaking and performance skills because under stressful situations, most students just try to get through the ordeal, but not improve their speaking skills. However, live presentations work much better than video presentations that usually detach the audience from the presenter and rob students of experience they badly need. They are better for rehearsal and review purposes. Teachers wonder how many students can benefit from such experience because it takes up a quite amount of class time with a large size of class. How will this activity promote the students’ presentation skills or communicative skills? Do teachers spend too much time teaching presentations or performances rather than language skills? Is
this learner-centered activity appropriate in an Asian context? Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies.No.4
The need for establishing a comfortable and low-threat learning environment, from the perspective of second language acquisition, has long been emphasized and recognized. The less anxious and more relaxed the learner, the better language acquisition proceeds (Krashen, 1982). However, the delivery of an oral presentation can be a source of extreme anxiety. It seems as though making oral presentations contradicts the principles of language teaching--lowering students’ anxiety levels results in better language acquisition. Anxiety causes performance to deteriorate and actually affects novice speaker’s self-esteem. Oral presentations can be a face-threatening activity, particularly for some Asian students.
Coping with Speech Anxiety
Speech anxiety, group boredom and limited presentation skills are the major problems that lead to students’ oral presentation failures. Mulac and Sherman (1974) give us a clear behavioral assessment of speech anxiety which “includes a quivering or tense voice, lack of volume, nonfluencies, heavy breathing, lack of eye contact or extraneous eye movement, rigidity or tension, fidgeting or motionless arms and hands. Every one can easily identify with sweaty palms, accelerated heart rate, and memory loss.” Teachers can easily detect these anxiety-related behaviors symptoms from students standing in front of the class. In order to help students effectively cope with their fear of oral presentations, it is essential for them to acknowledge that speech fright or speech anxiety is perfectly normal. Having an open discussion of speech anxiety and the
treatments will make students feel that they are not alone.
Fortunately, we can borrow some insights and strategies from psychotherapy and speech communication literature to help students overcome public speaking anxieties and reduce nervousness. Tips and advice provided by these literatures on conquering speech anxiety will certainly better prepare students for presentations.
Avoiding Group Boredom
Group boredom usually results from listening to memorized speeches. A total dependence on memorization is the pattern followed by most EFL presenters who usually have trouble adapting information to spoken English for the audience. The audience feels bored when they have to listen to a tedious reading or word-for-word memorized speech from a presenter who reads rapidly and monotonously, losing command of their voice, tone, and pacing. Reciting from passages copied down from references makes the presentation sound canned, machine-like and dull. Instead of using a conversational tone and communicative English, they have long pauses while fiddling with their notes. The reading of written English, with complex sentences and low frequency words, further impedes the audience’s listening comprehension. When the audience cannot follow the presentation, their attention drifts and they lose interest. This makes the speaker feel less confident.
Thus, the teacher should constantly remind students of the importance of using communicative English in their presentations and keeping the audience in mind when they prepare. They may use note cards as reminders of what they are going to say. It is much easier to establish
rapport with the audience by making eye contact and only referring to the note cards occasionally.
Teaching Presentation Skills
When oral presentations are assigned in class, the teacher will get either complete silence or grumbles from students who find it frustrating and intimidating. Lack of experience is usually the main producer of student stress and nervousness. Experience builds confidence, which is vital to effective oral presentations.
Some prerequisite skills are important in building students confidence for oral presentations. Otherwise, students will feel that the teacher has just dumped them into the sea to struggle for survival. If students’ past English learning experiences have been basically teacher-controlled and test-oriented, they may feel frustrated and overwhelmed. Passive resistance and grumbling are common signs manifested by students who do not appreciate and are even hostile to this project. They used to work on memorizing detailed grammatical rules, vocabulary out of contexts and isolated phrases or expressions by which their test grades are based on. It is a great challenge for teachers to free students from their detail-oriented learning strategies that have been widely used in grade schools. Some of these prerequisite skills include how to organize the main ideas and develop a logical, coherent outline. Without a clear introduction and conclusion, the presentation will often leave the audience confused. There is also a need for developing the student’s ability to grasp the general understanding of the material they read or listen to. Learning to produce a well-organized and coherent outline can be very helpful to
Preparing EFL Learners for Oral Presentations learners since an outline can give audiences a clear and concise overview of the key points of the talk.
Finally, helping students to conquer the fear of making grammatical or pronunciation errors is another effective way to clarify the purpose of oral presentation. Inform the learners that they will not be graded by the mistakes they make. Hand out the grading criteria to all learners while assigning this activity.
The Teacher’s Role
Working with students on oral presentations is a challenging job for teachers because it not only involves training in other disciplines such as speech communication and public speaking, but also demands more of teachers in terms of time and effort in lesson planning and teaching strategies. On the student’s part, the student-centered activity asks students to be responsible for their own learning. When a teacher moves from the traditional role of teacher as an authoritative expert to the new role of facilitator of learning, students may feel uncomfortable. They need to be psychologically prepared for autonomy and responsibility. The teacher needs to help students create a supportive learning atmosphere, develop interaction skills, and cooperative learning skills and apply computer/technology in enhancing teachers’ facilitative skills should be emphasized (King, 2001). In short, the teacher is the guide, organizer, consultant, resource person, and supporter.
The teacher’s role in oral presentations involves not only preparing detailed guidelines, organizing groups, helping students to select topics, guiding their research and helping them learn the use of various visual aids,
but also holding Q & A sessions, providing feedback on the sequencing of ideas, and evaluating their performance. Step-by-step procedures of how to prepare students for successful oral presentations are as follows:
Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies.No.4
Step 1: Handing Out Guidelines
Since oral presentations involve many skills, a carefully planned and constructed guideline will help develop students’ receptiveness to oral presentations. Listing instructional objectives and explaining reasons for this activity can increase student participation and may result in a heightening of satisfaction and achievement.
a.Hand out assignment forms (Appendix A) to organize students and help them distribute jobs among themselves.
b.Stress the time limit of presentations. If it is a twenty-five minute presentation, it will probably be thirty-five minutes in class, allowing for pauses, operating machines, and receiving questions from students. The teacher may need another five minutes of class time to have students fill out peer evaluation forms.
c.Grading criteria clearly states the teacher’s expectations for presentations.
Step 2: Grouping and Scheduling Student Presentations
It is challenging to plan presentations for a large EFL class. Group projects with 4-5 students in one group will save class time, develop cooperative learning skills and reduce anxiety. In order to have a dynamic group, with a feeling of cohesiveness and togetherness, even though learners have diverse learning styles, the teacher needs to be familiar with a variety of cooperative group techniques.
a.Groups of 4-5 students in a class of 50 work best1 and scheduling two groups every other week throughout the semester is a good plan.
b.Have students choose their own partners, since it is much easier for students to work out their own schedules for getting together outside class. If the teacher groups students from different departments together, there can be time conflicts among them.
c.Students choose one student as their group coordinator, responsible for evenly distributing the assignments among members.
Step 3: Choosing Topics and Gathering Information
Projects provide opportunities to study interesting topics in detail. Learners are free to choose any topic they prefer in three categories: event-oriented; student-initiated; and in-depth topic studies, in order to enhance their self-expression and creativity. Low-level students are not required to choose a topic that necessitates research, although they are encouraged to do so. It is interesting to see the variety of topics presented by students. Some students enjoy making skits of fairy tales. The reason for that may be their limited English proficiency, maturity and interest. Some advanced students’ topics deal more with issues pertinent to university students or current events.
Topics presented by students in the past were categorized as follows: performing arts, culture and customs, fairy tales and short stories, current issues, sports, holidays, American culture, the student’s field of specialization, hobbies, scripts from TV shows, entertainment and shows,
travel and tourist spots, and newspaper articles. Teachers could help students choose topics by:
a.Informing students where the resources are --English newspapers, magazines, websites, questionnaires, surveys, interviews, library, radio programs, English teaching institutes, travel brochures, etc.
b.Showing topics chosen by students in previous classes and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of them. Use some previous students’ videotapes as demos to teach good presentation skills and show some poor skills.
Step 4: Handling Technical Problems
It is important for students to know in advance how to handle the equipment themselves. Usually, students concentrate all their energies on performance and forget to check machines in advance and assume everything will happen as they plan or expect. Often they expect the teacher to fix their technical problems at the last minute. A discussion about the equal importance of both the rehearsal and the performance will prevent students from technical surprises and panic on the day of the presentation. However, wasted class time in fixing facility machinery can adversely affect the presentation, and even be a cause of failure at worst or the need for presenters to represent their material on another day.
There are many advantages in using visual aids during the presentation. Visual aids can create a powerful effect, help keep students’ attention, and illustrate main ideas. The basic rule is to use visual aids to support the presentation, not to dominate it. However, the disadvantage of overusing visual aids is that the attention of the audience will be divided
1 The oral presentation activity was developed for sophomore listening and speaking lab classes at
Soochow University, Taiwan. It is a one-year required course for all majors. Usually, a class of forty-five students will have a mixture of students from five or more departments.
Preparing EFL Learners for Oral Presentations Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies.No.4 and students may stand aside and have visual aids take their place.
Teachers could prepare students in the following ways:
h.Have time count for reviewing video clips and wind them to the correct spot.
a.Show supporting materials students can use, such as posters, videotapes, props, artwork, costumes...etc.
Step 5: Holding Q& A Sessions
These short sessions are like quality control that is necessary and helpful in ensuring effective presentations. Teachers can spot possible difficulties students might encounter and prevent the problems.
b.Tell students what facilities are available in the language lab and the school such as data viewer, VCR/DVD, tape recorder, PowerPoint, and slide projector, etc. Tell the possible problems that they may have with their equipment. For example, for outdoor V8 shooting, students need to be aware of sound effects.
a.Check with the group about what they are going to do a week before their presentation.
b.Encourage students to contact the teacher if they run into any problems; for example,students may have difficulties pronouncing words.
c.Students should know how to handle the equipment themselves and make sure everything is working a week before the presentation. They need to come to the class early to set up the equipment and become familiar with it.
Step 6: Preparing Peer and Teacher Evaluation Forms
The peer evaluation form (Appendix B) provides the presenters with feedback from other students. Students will not only evaluate their peers, but also learn each group’s strong and weak points from presentations. The teacher evaluation form (Appendix C) should be given to students while assigning the work. It can be used as a guideline for students to prepare their presentations. In this way, students are informed in advance of the criteria by which their presentations will be evaluated. It is helpful for students to know the teacher’s expectations and grading criteria. Individual accountability and grades based on the average of the team’s individual scores can help to avoid pitfalls such as the “free-rider effect” and the “sucker effect”.
d.Prepare a microphone for learners in advance to make sure good voice quality, so the teacher does not need to ask shy presenters to project their voice in a big room.
e.Ask students to keep eye contact when using transparencies or PowerPoint. If possible, control the lighting by not turning off the lights completely and always leave a light on in the back of the room, so the audience can still remain eye contact with the presenter.
f.Also remind students to refer to the image or texts on the projector. Allow time for the audience to read longer texts, otherwise there is no point putting them on.
g.Make sure writings and illustrations are big enough to be seen from the back of the room. Maybe give them an idea of font sizes for various distances.
Conclusion
constraints of oral presentations in an EFL learning environment as mentioned earlier, however, with structured planning and organization, oral presentations can be a beneficial and enjoyable activity for learners. Both teachers and students can expect a break away from textbooks. Each week, students come to class with great anticipation and excitement. It is a rewarding experience for low achieving students who have either given up on English or were intimated by past English learning experiences. The introduction of oral presentations to EFL classrooms provides a rewarding and stimulating experience both for teachers in developing facilitating skills and for students in training themselves to have confident presentations in public.
Works cited
Altschuler, L. Avoiding the stage effect: Ineffective and effective conversation class activities. Proceedings of ROC TEFL Oral Skills
Conference, Taiwan: National Changhua University, 1996, 353-363.
Cothran, D. A case study of Chinese students’ and teachers’ attitudes at
Tunghai University in Taiwan. Paper presented at the 12th R.O.C.
TEFL Conference, Tunghai University, 1995.
Ellis, G. How culturally appropriate is the communicative approach? ELT
Journal, 50(3), 1996,213-218.
Katchen, J.E. Using the video camera to improve speaking and
performance skills. Paper presented at the 8th R.O.C. TEFL Conference,
Taipei,1991.
King, J. Enhancing English teachers’ facilitative skills. Soochow Journal of
Foreign Language and Literature, 16. Taipei: Soochow University,2001.
Krashen, S.and Dulay, H., & Burt, M. Language two. New York: Oxford University Press,1982.
Meloni,C. and Thompson, S. Oral reports in the intermediate ESL classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 14 (4), 1980, 503-510.
Mulac, A., & Sherman, R.A. Behavioral assessment of speech anxiety.
Preparing EFL Learners for Oral Presentations Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies.No.4
Appendix C Appendix A
Teacher Evaluation Form
Assignment Form Group#:_________________Presentation Date:______________ Group#____Date____Topic____________________________________ Topic:__________________________________________________ Preparation Summary of Content:
___came to the class early to set up equipment Resources:__
___made sure all equipment in working condition Group Coordinator:_______________________________________
___turned in assignment sheet Group Members:
Organization
Name Role Assignment Individual Grade
___clear introduction
1________________________________________________________ ___logical development
2_________________________________________________________ ___strong conclusion
3_________________________________________________________ ___typed and clear outline
4_________________________________________________________ Content
5 ___variety of resources
___amount of research conducted
Appendix B
___originality
___read English resources
Student Evaluation Form
Presentation
Topic______________________________________________________
___held audience’s attention What did you like best about this presentation?
___spoke without reading word for word __________________________________________________________
___eye contact What are some ways to improve this presentation?
___time control __________________________________________________________
___volume of voice Did you learn anything new? What skills or advice could you use in the
future? ___effectiveness of visual aids
Oral skills
___adapted the information for the audience (communicative English) ___clarity and fluency
___provided discussion questions ___involved the audience in activities
Overall Group Rating_____________
