Raising students’ audience awareness for oral presentation through online role-reversal

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate how college students, who studied English as a Foreign Language (EFL), enhanced their audience awareness through online role-reversal to improve oral presentation. Twenty-eight college students volunteered to participate in a speaking training class. They underwent four phases of online role-reversal, peer modeling, peer feedback, peer assessment, and reflections on their scripts for better oral presentation. Data collected included the log files of online role-reversal, students’ first and final scripts, the evaluation rubric of presentation, and an open-ended questionnaire. Results showed that online role-reversal played a key role in raising the students’ audience awareness between presenters and audience, leading to oral presentation improvement. Specifically, the active students outperformed the passive students in the dimensions of content, logical structure, delivery manners, and interaction with peers. The active students experienced online role-reversal to a greater extent and produced better quality final scripts and oral presentations while the passive students made very few revisions on errors of content and structure. They merely copied peers’ feedback for grammatical corrections. This study suggests that students are engaged in online role-reversal to negotiate meaning, deal with difficulties, and reflect on their scripts to enhance audience awareness and consequently improve their oral presentation.

Introduction

Oral presentation, regarded as one of the core professional competencies for active participation in workplaces (Chan, 2011; Dubar, Brooks, & Kubicka-Miller, 2006; Mulder, 2014), integrates complex skills to “blend facts, persuasive language, and audience rapport with entertaining multimodal elements” (Barrett, Liu, & Wang, 2020, in press). An effective oral presentation requires creative connections between the content and the audience’s prior knowledge, clear logical structure, and appropriate delivery manners and interaction mechanisms according to audiences’ verbal and non-verbal messages (Van Ginkel, Gulikers, Biemans, & Mulder, 2017). Students with active learning attitudes are often equipped with complex skills through role-reversal (Shaw, 2012; Shukor, Tasir, Van der Meijden, & Harun, 2014) between presenters and audience in oral presentation.

With the rapid development of technology, online role-reversal has been widely used in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments (Vygotsky, 1978; Wang, 2015; Yang, 2018) to provide opportunities for positive social interactions among peers (Barrett & Liu, 2019). The social interactions raise learners’ awareness of learning processes so effectively and efficiently that they can learn either alone or in groups (Järvelä et al., 2015). Particularly, social interaction through a CSCL system could increase learners’ awareness, encourage communication and negotiation with peers in different perspectives, and engage learners in reflections on their learning (Järvelä et al., 2015). Hyland (2005) pointed out that the awareness between the presenter and audience through online role-reversal assisted the writer (or speaker) to express their ideas and enter into dialogues with their readers (or audience) within a community. Online role-reversal helps learners to switch roles, exchange viewpoints, develop audience awareness, reflect on their oral presentation, and thus lead to improvement in learning (Chen, 2016; Tseng & Tsai, 2007).

College students who study English as a foreign language (EFL) often encounter difficulties in oral presentation due to their poor oral language skills, passive learning attitudes, haphazard content (Chou, 2011), disjointed logic structure (Barrett & Liu, 2019; Bankowski, 2010), improper delivery manners (De Grez, Valcke, & Roozen, 2014), and lack of interaction and role-reversal among peers (Amirian & Tavakoli, 2016). Thus, how to equip EFL college students with language skills and interaction with audience in oral presentation becomes increasingly important in higher education (Van Ginkel, Gulikers, Biemans, & Mulder, 2015). In the past, some studies indicated students benefited from online role-reversal through working together with peers for learning difficulties (Bradley, Lindstrom, & Rystedt, 2010; Wang, 2015; Yeh, 2014). Other studies showed online role-reversal enhanced college students’ language skills (Alyousef & Picard, 2011; Kuteeva, 2011). However, few studies have discussed how to improve EFL college students’ oral presentation by developing their audience awareness through online role-reversal in a CSCL system. This study thus aimed to examine the impact of online role-reversal on active and passive students’ audience awareness to improve their speech scripts in oral presentation through a CSCL system.