行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告
台灣研究所學生之學術英文能力的發展
計畫類別： 個別型計畫
計畫編號： NSC94-2411-H-011-008-
執行期間： 94 年 08 月 01 日至 95 年 07 月 31 日 執行單位： 國立臺灣科技大學應用外語系
計畫主持人： 吳美貞
計畫參與人員： 五位研究生與五位老師
報告類型： 精簡報告
處理方式： 本計畫可公開查詢
中 華 民 國 95 年 10 月 31 日
Research Report I. Research problem
This study attempts to examine difficulties that graduate students may encounter when developing their academic oral proficiency. Five graduate students were recruited. Interviews and observations were conducted for the period of eight months. Initially, this study attempted to examine difficulties associated with different academic oral tasks. However, during the observations of classes and interviews, it was discovered that the course instructor had decided to focus on training students in the delivery of formal academic oral presentation. Thus, the research questions are refined as follows
1. How do students view the task of academic oral presentation?
2. What are some of the difficulties these graduate students may encounter when preparing and delivering their oral presentations?
II. Findings
A. Complex Process
Academic oral presentations seemed to be a complex learning process for the graduate students involved. The task appeared to be complex for these graduate students in three ways. First, students found that even though they had some prior knowledge about how to make oral presentations, their understanding of the
requirement for academic oral presentation was limited. More specifically, students found that oral tasks were much more involving than they realized.
Topic: Direction for preparation
Student A: I just don’t know where to start. I mean I know the formats. I know I need to have an introduction, body and a conclusion. But, what to put in each of the categories is a problem. I never realized I had to think about so many issues.
Student C: I found combining my ideas very difficult. I thought I was good in speaking. But, in this class, I think I am a poor speaker. I don’t know speaking anymore. I never thought about effectiveness.
Student D: I know my topic but so what? I have ideas in all directions.
Everything seems to be important. I don’t understand my teacher’s requirement even when I read her instruction many times.
Second, students found the task of academic oral presentation mentally and physically straining. Students found that doing oral presentation required much work in planning and in rehearsing. Even when their speech was well-structured, students still had to struggle with remembering the lines. At the same time, the fear of not sounding natural and effective made the task even more stressful for the students. On the other hand, students reported their mental stress as well. Being on stage was a
difficult process for many of these students even though many of them were teachers who have had much experience in speech. Students reported that their mental stress came from not just the language but from the fear of being laughed at by the peer and classroom instructor.
Topic: Mental and physical stress
Student D: I get extremely tired after my presentation. The week before the presentation, I don’t sleep well. I know I prepared a lot but I don’t know if my teacher knows this.
Student E: I am so afraid of speaking. Even when I was a student, I hated making a speech. Luckily, I didn’t have to do a lot. But, in this class, I am forced to talk. I am scared.
Third, students found the definition of academic oral presentations confusing.
Students reported that they had experiences in making informative or persuasive speeches about a familiar topic. However, when engaging in oral speeches in this class, students found it difficult to grasp the notion of the term “academic”. In other words, students had many different interpretations of the word “academic”. Some understood the word “academic” to mean “using technical words”. Some believed that the word “academic” meant sounding “official”.
Topic: Definition of “academic” oral task
Student A: My teacher always talked about “academic” but I really don’t know what that word is. I mean I know the meaning of the word “academic”
but I don’t really know what my teacher wants in class.
Student D: I think academic presentation just means that you have to use difficult theories and words to describe something you want to talk about. I think that is hard because I have very few vocabulary.
Student E Academic presentation means I have to give a formal talk. I cannot use everyday words. I cannot use idioms.
B. Difficulties
The summary of the difficulties came from interviews with the students, the course instructor and students’ other instructors. Several types of difficulties were reported by the participants in this study. First, students found it problematic to
rephrase what they have read in their articles. The problem seemed to be of two levels.
One problem was their language. Paraphrasing a text was difficult in English because they felt they had limited knowledge in English expressions. In addition, even when they were able to reword the theories from their articles, they ran the risk of sounding childish. Another problem was in their lack of training in paraphrasing. During their previous educational training, they were trained in focusing on the verbatim account of the important theories from the text. Thus, rewording a theory proved to be quite
challenging.
The second difficulty was in the notion of synthesizing. Teachers found that students were quite weak in their ability to synthesize the information they have read.
It appeared that the instructors who were interviewed felt that students tended to just provide a summary of what they have read without considering what the article meant.
For example, one of the requirements for the oral task in class was being able to evaluate the article critically. However, when the course instructor asked students to discuss the problems and strengths of the article, students often focused on their feeling of the article rather than on the content of the article. Some of the students’
responses in evaluation were:
Student B: The article was quite nice because I think reading strategies were quite important.
Student D: The article was written quite clearly. I understood the main ideas.
Student E: I learned a lot from the article about listening theories. I didn’t know the theories before.
Third, the problem was related to the genre of academic research. The instructor had required all the students to discuss and evaluate essential elements of a piece of research. In other words, students had to discuss and evaluate the quality of a piece of research orally. The issues such as the research problem, the theoretical framework, the methodology and the findings in a study had to be documented. However, students found these concepts quite difficult even in their native language. As a result, when students had to speak about these terms in English, students did not know how to report on them. Students ended up just finding answers to those sections of a study and summarizing them. Students seemed to lack in their knowledge of what constitutes a piece of research.
Fourth, students had problems in being specific. The observation data suggested that one of the most common comments made by the course instructor after students’
presentations was that students lacked a specific example to support their points.
Furthermore, the interviews of the course instructor and other university level oral class instructor suggested a similar finding. Students seemed to use quite general examples to support their ideas. The following example demonstrated one student’s strategy of support in this speech. In this example, the student used the conditional structure in order to support the usefulness of task-based learning.
Student A: Task-based learning has many benefits. If students can engage in tasks, they can learn to combine many skills such as reading, writing and speaking.
Students would prefer task-based learning and not teacher-centered.
This report is a preliminary investigation of the area of academic oral proficiency.
The aim of this study is to identify issues that will be explored in future studies.
