Methodology course paper on the theme

1.2.Developing Students’ English Oral Presentation Skills
Oral presentation competence comprises knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are required in order to speak in public, where the goals may include informing, or persuading the audience, or self-expressing. Such competence has not only become the basis of essential skills across disciplines within the academic fields, including Humanities and Social Sciences, but has also turned into a must-have skill for all university graduates. Communication, especially in the oral mode, has been included as one of the essential 21st century skills. Different types of courses provided in higher education commonly integrate oral presentations either as part of the course activities or as part of the course learning objectives. However, the ability to do oral presentations in front of a public audience is a complex task , because psychological and contextual factors may significantly affect presentation performance and delivery. A recent mixed methods study from Tsang, for instance, showed a significant correlation between students’ perceived competence regarding the delivery of oral presentations and their level of anxiety with respect to public speaking. With this in mind, public oral presentations can become an even more complex task when one is required to deliver it in a foreign language, such as English. ⁵
The importance of acquiring oral presentation skills is normally noticeable in the practice of teaching and learning in the classroom, in which students are regularly assigned to present their ideas, arguments, opinions, and research results either in a group or individually across academic courses over time. All these activities aim at enhancing students’ oral presentation skills, which will be advantageous when they graduate and start working as professionals. Nonetheless, students’ oral presentation skills are still of concern; complaints about graduates’ poor presentation skills are still not scarce and it has been identified that graduates tend to rate their oral communication skills highly, which is different from the standards of good oral communication perceived by industry. Due to the disparity of communication standards, previous studies have called upon education practitioners to better prepare undergraduates in oral presentations and articulate industry expectations in the area of communication skills more clearly. In the present day, university students and graduates are normally required to have the ability to perform a presentation in English to a public audience. The present study intends to contribute to the development of research within English oral presentation skills among Thai EFL learners at the university level with a focus on the interplay among English proficiency, self-confidence, and teacher feedback. By exploring General English courses for Sciences and Technology and Humanities and Social Sciences, which aim at the development of oral skills, the researchers examine the roles of self-confidence, teacher feedback, and English proficiency in developing students’ English oral presentation competence. This study also examines if students’ gender and academic major affect the development of students’ presentation skills in English. Existing research has indicated that these three variables separately play influential roles in students’ oral presentation. However, no research has examined the three variables in a single study. As developing students’ oral presentation skills, especially in English, has been important in higher education, understanding factors that matter in the development process is equally as crucial as teaching the skill.
Self-confidence is "an individual’s recognition of his own abilities, loving himself, and being aware of his own emotions". It lies in ones’ belief and trust in themselves and their capabilities in performing certain tasks or actions. To some extent, Brown considered self-confidence similar to self-esteem and simply thought that they referred to, "the way people evaluate or appraise their abilities and personality characteristics". Further, despite the limited number of studies, there have been some differences with regard to the types of self-confidence across contexts. For instance, asserted that, in the Turkish context, self-confidence can be divided into two types, involving inner confidence and outer confidence. Inner confidence refers to the ideas and feelings that reflect how much individuals are delighted and satisfied with themselves. Outer confidence emphasizes one’s ability in controlling their feelings. Similarly, used the terms intrinsic self-confidence for the thoughts and emotions that one possesses as a result of being pleased with themselves and extrinsic confidence for the behavior and attitude that one holds towards others in the effort of communicating and controlling their emotions. Meanwhile, in an earlier study, Park and Lee investigated the interrelationships among B1 level students’ anxiety, self-confidence, and oral performance in the Korean context. They identified four underlying factors encompassing situational confidence, communication confidence, language potential confidence, and language ability confidence. These differences implied that the factors underlying self confidence might be context-bound, and the present study intends to examine the underlying factors of students’ self-confidence in the Thai context. ⁶
Self-confidence has always been connected not only to oral presentation tasks but also to almost all the tasks that students are assigned to perform with favorable outcomes. In English oral presentations, self- confidence has a significant role as it lessens students’ anxiety and fear to speak in the target language. It can give students a sense of achievement and consequently enhance their endeavor for better accomplishments. In an empirical study with Indonesian students, examined the correlation between self-confidence and achievement in English oral presentation, which disclosed a strong, positive correlation. Bolívar-Cruz and Verano-Tacoronte investigated the effect of gender on students’ oral presentation competence at a Spanish university. Their findings revealed that male students’ performances were influenced by the existence of incentives, while females’ performances relied primarily on self-confidence. In contrast, Warren did not find sex and age to be influential in students’ self-reported confidence scores in relation to their oral presentation skills. When self-confidence was linked to self-assessment of oral presentation skill, a strong association with gender was discovered, with male students’ assessments being less accurate than female students’. These different findings on the role of gender in students’ oral presentation competence imply that self-confidence might not be the only factor significantly influencing male and female students’ presentation competence. Additionally, given the previous studies conducted in different countries, there might a context-related factor causing the differences. The present study, hence, intends to continue the exploration of the role of gender in the context of Thai EFL students, which is still insufficiently researched, with the addition of two variables, i.e., teacher feedback, and English proficiency.⁷
Teacher feedback is one of the essential elements that guide the teaching and learning process, further leading either to development or deterioration of students’ abilities to perform tasks. In an oral presentation, it is a response to students’ competence and performance provided by the teacher, allowing the comparison between the actual and desired outcomes. In other words, it is post-response information that helps students improve their future performance. Since the objective is for improvement, teacher feedback should be positive and constructive, yet honest and accurate. Teachers should have an awareness of motivational value and positivity within their feedback as it may cause long-term impacts on students’ performance. Without any feedback, students may have different interpretations of their oral presentation performance and repeat the same mistakes in their future presentations. Nicol and Macfarlane asserted that positive and constructive feedback plays different roles in different situations, such as clarifying what constitutes bad and good presentations, guiding students’ self-assessment on their presentation skills, and enhancing positive and courageous beliefs within themselves. Therefore, teacher feedback should be immediate, motivational, constructive, positive, relevant to the students’ needs, specific, and in different forms or expressions. Effective and beneficial feedback is constant, consistent, and focused on particular tasks done by the students. Previous empirical studies have obtained a wide range of results regarding the impact of teacher feedback on students’ oral presentation competence and performance. According to, who investigated teacher, peer, and self-feedback, they discovered the superiority of teacher feedback for enhancing students’ presentation behavior; nonetheless, in a comparative study, Murillo-Zamorano and Montanero showed that teacher feedback could only improve students’ presentation performance by 5%, while peer feedback improved it by 10%. The finding of a case study from Wang et al. on teacher feedback to student oral presentations in EFL classrooms indicated, "teacher commentary on oral presentations does not only provide a tool for consolidating students’ linguistic knowledge, but also, perhaps more importantly, aids the development of communicative competence and discourse strategies". Recently, Al Jahromi, who researched whether teacher- and peer-formative feedback could enhance students’ oral presentation skills, disclosed that teacher feedback helped improve students’ performances in the final presentations and was more favorable by students. Experienced EFL teachers reported that error correction was not the primary objective of their overall feedback, yet rather the students’ acquisition of communicative and presentation competence. In brief, there have been studies exploring the impact of teacher feedback on students’ oral presentation, but how teacher feedback, self-confidence, and English proficiency affect students’ English oral presentation competence is still insufficiently researched. Thus, the present study expects to deepen the understanding of the effect of teacher feedback when examined together with self-confidence and English proficiency towards students’ oral presentation performance.⁸
The term ‘proficiency’ in this context refers to the state of being fluent in English. To understand the definition of English proficiency, Harsch advised looking at the multilayered componential nature of English proficiency, encompassing horizontal and vertical dimensions. The horizontal dimension is the division of English proficiency into sub-skills, involving the four main English skills of listening, reading, writing, and speaking while the vertical dimension categorizes English proficiency into test-reporting purposes. In other words, English proficiency is reported in different levels either as a whole or in specific skills. English proficiency is commonly applied to those whose first language is not English measured by various means, including standardized tests such as IELTS, TOEFL, and toeic. Villarrael laborated that proficiency in the second language consists of oral and academic language. Oral proficiency refers to " development of conversational vocabulary, grammar, and listening comprehension. Meanwhile, academic proficiency refers to various skills, including word reading, spelling, reading, fluency, reading comprehension, and writing". English proficiency is undeniably the primary goal of learning a foreign language and an indicator of one’s language ability. Thus, the body of the literature has provided a large number of empirical studies examining a wide range of variables that can potentially influence EFL learners’ proficiency. Nevertheless, there is a limited number of studies directly investigating the effect of English proficiency in learners’ oral presentation performance and competence. Of the limited number of studies, a few findings have been highlighted. Oral presentations have been used as an activity to develop EFL learners’ proficiency. Fisher and Frey researched teachers who developed and implemented interventions using oral presentations with urban school students in the U.S. According to their findings, formative trials concentrating on the use of language frames, needs based grammar training, purposeful instruction on public speaking, self-recording, and feedback helped students improve their English proficiency. Students with different levels of English proficiency evaluate their peers’ oral presentations differently in Japan, indicating the effect of proficiency of students’ views on their presentation performances. As for the teaching materials, providing opportunities for students to watch videos of model presentations may positively affect their presentation performance. The results of a cross-sectional interdisciplinary comparative study by Amirian and Tavakoli proposed for more practical oral presentation courses that directly helped increase students’ oral proficiency skills. In the present study, English proficiency is utilized through its interrelationships with self-confidence and teacher feedback and its potential predictive role on students’ oral presentation performance, which has not been explored much by preceding research in this area.
Of the three variables of interests, the results of the literature review show that most of the previous empirical studies examining students’ oral presentation skills have investigated the role of teacher feedback, while the roles of self-confidence and English proficiency are still insufficiently researched. In addition, there is also an indication that academic majors may contribute in the development of students’ presentation competence. Furthermore, empirical studies within this area of research are still rare to be found in the context of Thai EFL learners. ⁹
Therefore, this study aims to provide empirical evidence on the interplay among self confidence, teacher feedback, and English proficiency as well as the roles of these three variables on developing students’ English oral presentation competence. The exploration includes two presentation courses, i.e., English Presentation in Sciences and Technology and English Presentation in Social Sciences and Humanities, at the undergraduate level at Walailak University, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand. The course design involves several stages of preparations coupled with teacher feedback, continuously scaffolding students’ English presentation competence to the final presentation. The research questions are presented below. The design of this study was quantative with the focus on classroom practices. In this type of research design, teachers’ critical observation and inquiry during their involvement, as well as teachers’ fast attempts to accomplish a desired change in the learning outcomes, are crucial to the research design. Task-based language teaching was chosen as the teaching approach to prepare the students for their presentation task. The implementation lasted for one term in English Presentation in Sciences and Technology and English Presentation in Social Sciences and Humanities Courses at Walailak University, Thailand in the Academic Year of 2019-2020. Figure 1 illustrates the implementation of the research design.

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