Successful oral presentation effectually involves multi-faceted training of listening, writing, and nonverbal delivery besides speaking orally, which calls for a systematical holistic/multimodal approach. However, a multimodal learning environment for fostering EFL learners’ presentation development remains virtually unexplored. This study employed multimodal strategies adopted from the VARK model (visual, aural, reading/writing, and kinesthetic/gestural) with the support of digital audio, video, and speech visualization technologies in an English presentation course at a university in Taiwan. Two EFL classes served respectively as the experimental group with a technology-mediated multimodal approach and the control group with a traditional oral approach. Specifically, this research evaluated the experimental participants’ oral performance and explored their perceptions of this technology-mediated multimodal approach and its advantages and disadvantages as identified by the participants. Results from independent t-tests showed marginal significant progress of presentation performance in the experimental group. Descriptive statistics from the perception survey and content analysis of students’ reflective responses indicated that the participants were overwhelmingly positive about technology-supported multimodal activities implemented in the oral training course but encountered psychological and technological challenges when producing multimodal assignments. Theoretically, the results support the extension of multimodal theory to EFL oral presentation education. Practically the study informs EFL presentation instructors of the validity of technological-enhanced VARK strategies for learning and teaching EFL presentation. The research results also bear significant implications for the necessity of learner training on technology practices when pedagogy with the integration of multimodal technologies into EFL speech education is implemented.
Drama activities are reported to foster language learning, and may prepare learners for oral skills that mirror those used in real life. This year-long time series classroom-based quasi-experimental study followed a between-subjects design in which two classes of college EFL learners were exposed to two oral training conditions: (1) an experimental one in which drama-based training pedagogy was employed; and (2) the comparison one in which ordinary public speaking pedagogy was utilized. The experimental participants dramatized a picture book into a play, refined and rehearsed it for the classroom audience, and eventually performed it publicly as a theater production for community children. Diachronic comparisons of the participants’ oral presentation skills under the two conditions showed that a significant between-group difference began to become pronounced only after the experimental participants started to present for real-life audiences other than their classmates. This finding suggests that drama-mediated pedagogy effectively enhanced the experimental participants’ presentation performance and became more effective than the traditional approach only after a real-life audience was involved. In addition to the participants’ performance data, survey and retrospective protocols were utilized to shed light on how drama-based tasks targeting both classroom and authentic audiences influence college EFL learners’ presentation performance and their self-perceived oral presentation skills. Analysis of the survey and retrospective data indicated that the participants’ attention to three presentation skills—structure, audience adaptation and content—was significantly raised after their presentation involved a real-life audience. Based on these findings, pedagogical implications for drama for FL oral presentation instruction are discussed.
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