Enhancing EFL Students' English Presentation Skills with a Project-Based Approach

Chia-Ti Tseng

《觀光與休閒管理期刊》 10卷2期 (2022/12) Pp. 85-95

https://doi.org/10.6510/JTLM.202212_10(2).0008

摘要

This study introduces the curriculum design for an English presentation skill course in an EFL context. Adopting a project-based approach, this study explores student perspectives regarding their learning outcome and the challenges they encountered in this course. Twenty-one non-English major intermediate level EFL students enrolled in this elective course from a university in Northern Taiwan. Content of speaking and listening, speech preparation, and presentation, verbal and nonverbal elements of speech were all introduced and thoroughly practiced in this course. To maximize students' exposure to authentic language, ted-talks, talk shows, movies, news and etc., were also adopted as supplemental teaching materials for students to comprehend, analyze, summarize and provide feedback from these language input. A final presentation which involved students to present their chosen topics, with an informative or persuasive speech, was carried out in class and the whole speech was recorded for each presenter's self-evaluation and peer reviews. To discern students' perspectives on the effectiveness of the course, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted. The results revealed students' positive gains on both content knowledge and language skills. In particular, students highlighted on the benefits of conducting the final oral project, such as learning to effectively synthesize different sources of information, to organize their ideas in cohesion, to appropriately create their power point slides and to present their speech accurately and fluently in class for final recording. In addition, expansion on vocabularies, increased familiarity with different kinds of speech deliveries, students' enhanced learning motivation, heightened confidence, and critical thinking ability were also reported. Other pedagogical implication and suggestions are discussed in this paper.

關鍵字

English Presentation Skills ； Project-based Approach ； Curriculum Design ； Learner Perspectives ； Critical Thinking