New trends in vocabulary learning focus on strategic vocabulary learning to create more active and independent language learners. Utilising suitable contextual clues strategies is seen as vital in enabling and equipping language learners with the skill to guess word meaning accurately, moving away from dependency on a dictionary to improve their academic reading experience. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to investigate types of contextual clues selected and the extent of learners’ ability to obtain accurate word meaning through contextual guessing. The participants were Business Management students of various programmes who were taught contextual clues strategies and tested using class work sheet to analyse their utilisation of the strategies. Results indicated most participants depended on variety of contextual clues strategies, particularly cognitive strategies. The participants were also observed to be independent in guessing word meaning by making conscious decisions, as well as showing minimal reference to the instructor when attempting to utilise the strategies taught. Nevertheless, other interesting results indicated unsuccessful accurate guesses by some participants despite similar strategy choice. Overall conclusions indicated a degree of successful language learners who self direct themselves by making conscious and informed strategy choices. This leads to more emphasis on the importance of teaching and learning how to utilise suitable contextual clues strategies in continuous effort in improving and utilising the skill.
Communication strategies are basically ways utilised by students to manage their interactions in a target language learnt. Fear of oral presentations is still common among students due to many reasons. In order to cope with such fear when communicating in English, communication strategies (CS) are employed by students to assist them in communicating in the most effective way they feel they could. This preliminary study on CS and fear of oral presentations are conducted to investigate how CS influences oral presentations and how factors leading them to fear oral presentations influence their oral presentations. A survey was done on 51 undergraduates of a public university. Data was analysed using the SPSS and reported in a form of mean values. Findings on participants' use of communication strategies in influencing their oral presentations revealed that most participants were inclined to use more strategies involving human factor in influencing how they would present orally. Furthermore, findings on fear of oral presentation in influencing their oral presentations indicated the highest concern on evaluation marks and nervousness in reflecting how they would perform oral presentations. These findings could reflect the need for the university to guide students on communication strategies available to them so that they could be employed by students to communicate more effectively in public.
Effective public speaking is a necessary and desired ability that university graduates need to possess. This is to build into them a sense of confidence and success in communicating in today's challenging, evolving and borderless working world. However, fear or anxiety among university students still prevails and affects the way they communicate, and thus they utilise communication strategies (CS) to help them communicate orally effectively. There are multiple triggers of learners' fear of public speaking which could be externally and internally driven. Therefore, this study aims to continuously explore the influence of CS on fear of oral presentation, the influence of fear on oral presentation and the strength of the relationship between CS and fear of oral presentation. Quantitative data on the influence was analysed utilising the SPSS for mean values and Pearson correlational analysis through a 4-section survey derived from 134 respondents from a public university. Results indicated that CS preferred by most of the respondents were mostly externally influenced in shaping their oral communication and assessment marks and feeling nervous were their largest causes of fear of public speaking. Furthermore, correlational findings revealed that communication strategies may reduce fear of oral presentation to some degree. These results could suggest the need for more formal strategy training to assist and build motivational needs for learners to manage their fear of public speaking to benefit more from communication strategies for effective public speaking.
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