Listeners' Responses in Interaction Through Videoconferencing for Presentation Practices

Abstract

This study investigated the change of listeners' responses of Japanese learners of English over a semester of presentation training sessions. We were also concerned with the relationship between speaking ability and perceived use of listeners' responses. In this paper, the listeners' responses we focused on were: acknowledging signals, repetition of the teacher's utterances, and asking questions to the teacher. Therefore, the research questions were: (1) how did the learners' perceived use of listener's responses change over time?, and (2) what is the relationship between speaking ability and listeners' responses? The participants were 21 Japanese university students whose majors were in Economics. During the English teacher in charge of a group of three Japanese learners listened to three presentations during a 50-minute session. Speaking ability was assessed through an interview test following the format of STEP Eiken test for Japanese learners of English. To obtain the data of the listeners' responses, a questionnaire was provided after each session, asking how much they could actually put into practice from the three types of responses. The results indicated that as for RQ (1), three learners' responses changed to some extent over the sessions. Concerning RQ (2), of the teacher's utterance. From these results it can be said that videoconferencing interaction, particularly after presentation, provided opportunities for the learners to increase output and interaction, which boosts their L2 performance development.