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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   1.Debate as a pedagogical tool for developing speaking skills in second language education
   

The ability to speak a second or foreign language properly is an arduous task considering the interwoven factors that come into play when acquiring this abilit. Speaking is a cognitively and socially taxing skill; it entails encoding and expressing thoughts in speech streams that make sense and are contextually appropriate. The need to conceptualize, formulate and articulate thoughts demands a lot of cognitive space in the working memory, a fact that obstructs learners from adequately attending to all aspects of speech Richards and Renandya stated that ‘a large percentage of the world’s language learners study English in order to develop proficiency in speaking’. Learners need to speak English well for better academic and career opportunities in a globalized world that highlights the importance of oral communication skills. Nonetheless, despite its importance, English speaking practice has been marginalized in many educational contexts. As a result, it is no wonder that many studies have expressed concern about the speaking ability of speaking learners. English speaking in Dutch secondary schools faces similar neglect, many students believe that speaking is insufficiently trained in class and feel frustrated that they are not able to express themselves fully in the target language after many years of instruction. As a result, many secondary school students’ speaking skills suffer from deficiencies, and the effects thereof are more noticeable and detrimental at the university and college stage. ¹⁰
English teachers and students alike have expressed their concern about the current situation. Interviews with Dutch secondary school teachers of English revealed that speaking skills receive the least attention in comparison to other skills in their teaching practice. The teachers ascribed the negligence to the absence of viable teaching tools that would enable their students to effectively practice speaking. In addition, Brown  has maintained that in the speaking context, instructors are confronted with the challenge of finding ways that ensure language development within limited time and budgetary constraints. To overcome these limitations, Brown  proposed employing innovative instructional tools like debates, as their gains ‘can equal if not exceed uptake that occurs in extended immersion environments’.
Debate has been considered a potentially effective pedagogical tool for speaking, which can scaffold and feed the learning process in ways that can lead to language development. Speaking occupies the lion’s share of attention during debate. In addition to planned speech, debates involve a lot of impromptu speaking, as debaters have to think quickly and respond to opponents’ arguments, especially during the ‘clash’ stage. Various studies have reported improvements in students’ speaking competence after participation in debates. Nevertheless, all the studies that have correlated debate participation with oral competency development were based on self-reported data, questionnaires and interviews in addition to instructors’ observations. Experimental evidence that substantiates the existing anecdotal data is notably absent. The main objective of this study is, therefore, to provide some empirical evidence about the effects of an in-class debate intervention on various aspects of speaking competence, employing a pretest–posttest design. Without empirical evidence, the claimed effects of debate on speaking skills remain groundless. This study is premised on the hypothesis that debate pedagogy constitutes an effective avenue for enhancing many areas of English speaking skills. We will discuss the rationale behind this hypothesis in the next section.¹¹
A number of theoretical approaches to English acquisition provide a rationale for assuming a potential effect of debates on speaking skills. For example, the interaction hypothesis of English acquisition pointed out that interactive tasks, such as conversations, set the stage for the negotiation of meaning and that through this channel input and output are connected in a productive way. Likewise, Ellis and Shintani  maintained that interaction can operate ‘as a source of input and opportunities for output which foster the internal processing that results in acquisition’ . Interaction provides learners with multiple opportunities to negotiate meaning and form in ways that lead to English development. Gass and Mackey  concluded that ‘there is a robust connection between interaction and learning’. Debating involves meaningful multi-level interactions. These interactions, which are fuelled and enriched by the competitive atmosphere of debates, assist learners to notice language gaps and accordingly modify and refine their English output. Wade  eulogized the efficacy of the debate-induced interactions, stating that ‘there are certainly trends in education which encourage interactive and dialogic pedagogies, but few are as potent as debate’.¹²
The output hypothesis of Swain and Lapkin provides another theoretical perspective that supports that debates could foster English acquisition. They argued that output provides learners with unique opportunities to process language. Output can assist language learning through prompting learners to notice their language gaps, testing out hypotheses and reflecting consciously on forms. Engagement in bidirectional output highlights gaps in English learners’ interlanguage system and hence facilitates attending to the problematic areas in their language. Benati  argued that involving English learners in structured collaborative output tasks can ‘facilitate the accurate and appropriate use of language forms and structures’. Debate, by its nature, prompts a great deal of oral output as debaters challenge each other’s perspectives and feel the urge to outshine each other’s arguments and how they frame them. In addition to oral output, debate pedagogy may also induce a considerable amount of written output which can boost the oral output. Furthermore, the debate environment does not only raise consciousness about linguistic deficiency, but it also stimulates experimenting with new forms and as well as using language consciously.
Speaking activities are commonly considered as ‘Practice activities rather than English activities’. The act of writing holds a language learning potential, seeing that ‘composition writing elicits attention to form-meaning relations that may prompt learners to refine their linguistic expression – and hence their control over their linguistic knowledge’. We make a similar assumption about speaking in our debate intervention, as it fits this pedagogical mould. We believe that the act of speaking holds a comparable learning potential. Debates create a genuine environment for a meaningful, functional and purposeful use of the target language. In debates, students argue with a communicative and functional purpose in mind: defending their proposition and weakening that of their opponents. Attaining this goal necessitates the use of accurate and sophisticated language. As we shall see, in our debate intervention the act of speaking is not an end in itself, but it functions as a vehicle for synthesizing and analysing arguments and as ‘a task through which language practice can be orchestrated’. Anderson  stated that ‘it is hard to imagine a more harmonious integration of content and language skills than in the teaching of debate’. In short, the debate environment promotes the interface and synergy of two speaking perspectives: learning-to-speak and speaking-to-learn perspectives. ¹³
Debate activities place students at the center of learning, with the teacher assuming the role of a coach, advisor and facilitator. Blumberg  argued that when students are central in the learning process, they are empowered to gain benefits, such as higher rates of content retention, interaction, enjoyment of class activities and deeper understanding of material. Similarly, Emaliana  pointed out that student-centred learning provides opportunities for a ‘conducive atmosphere of learning, dynamic classroom activities, and [offers opportunities] to do autonomous learning’. Debates lend themselves readily to the philosophy of student-centered pedagogy. A well-designed debate pedagogy grants students tools and power to manage the learning process with minimal interventions on the part of the instructor. In debates, students do most of the talking and thinking, which promotes deep learning. In addition, debates promote a healthy competitive pedagogy that serves language learning in many ways. The inherent competitive atmosphere of debate fuels students to generate rich and lengthy negotiations. What is more, research has shown that students hold a positive attitude towards debates and describe them as fun and instructive. This positive task attitude is beneficial to learning as recent empirical research has revealed that there is a positive correlation between task attitude and language acquisition.¹⁴
Taken together, several theoretical and pedagogical perspectives on English acquisition indicate that debate can be a fruitful avenue for oral language learning. Yet, only a limited body of research has investigated how debates can affect oral competence. Littlefield  noted that this dearth of research is particularly noticeable in the secondary school context. It manifests itself in the fact that ‘very few manuscripts dealing with high school debate have been published in academic journals’. The paucity of research that Omelicheva and Avdeyeva, and Littlefield have pointed out concerns the English context. In the English context, the debate research is scarce in the extreme. No empirical study, to the best of our knowledge, has examined the impact of English debate instruction on oral proficiency across all main dimensions of speech production, including speech quantity, fluency, accuracy, complexity and cohesion dimensions in well-controlled empirical designs. Providing empirical-based evidence may stimulate instructors to employ debates in their teaching practice.
Our debate task design was validated in a previous study following the principles and guidelines of educational design research. Students in the intervention group participated in ten debates, one per week. The topics of debates were selected in consultation with the debating students, who received one week of preparation time for each debate. Each debate consisted of three stages: pre-debate, during-debate and post-debate. In the pre-debate stage, the students received a reading assignment relevant to the topic under debate and were asked to find and read one additional article. We instructed the students to summarize the articles and to write a case² in which they had to defend their standpoints. During actual debates, each student presented a speech and a rebuttal and participated in a clash. While listening to each other, the students were instructed to note down mistakes and the words they learned from each other’s contributions. We used two debate formats: debating in a group of four debaters and a one-to-one debating format. All debates had three phases: speech, rebuttal and clash. In the post-debate stage, the teachers provided feedback on the students’ written cases and asked them to revise and resubmit them.

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