“I Feel Nervous and Lose My Ideas When Having Presentation”: Mapping Senior Students’ Challenges in Academic Oral Presentation in English

Abstract

This study explored senior students' challenges when presenting their research proposal and thesis in English. This study was conducted in the English Teacher Education Department of the University of Nahdlatul Wathan Mataram. Five students who did their final project and five lecturers who were involved in reviewing activities were investigated in this study. The results of this study were expected to better understand students' major problems, sources of problems and how these could be tackled. A qualitative case study was employed to conduct this investigation. Observations, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews were used to collect the data. The data were analyzed by using qualitative content analysis. The findings of this study revealed several students' difficulties in giving oral presentations. They are: a) lack vocabulary, b) anxiety, c) poor understanding of their research proposal, d) not confident to have presentation in English, e) poor display of presentation, f) eye contact, and g) poor speaking skills including pronunciation issues. These difficulties are mostly related to psychological and linguistic aspects. This study also revealed recommendations to tackle these issues, including a) vocabulary enrichment through reading, b) presentation rehearsal, c) observing other students when having presentation, d) learning to make effective and interesting slides, e) learning most commonly used phrases for presentation, f) practice in using mind mapping and small cards to organize ideas.

Indonesian EFL Students' attitude toward Oral Presentations

“…Previous studies reported that psychological issues during speaking performance were reported to be among the biggest issues (Said & Weda, 2018) which cause the EFL students unable to carry themselves well (i.e. Choi et al, 2019, Arifin, 2017, Hue, 2010, Hadi, et, al, 2020. To overcome psychological challenges, some previous studies suggest the teachers to do intervention to help the students out of their anxiety (Ayuningtyas, 2020).…”

Metadiscourse Markers in Academic Oral Presentations: A Corpus Analysis

“…Academic oral presentation (AOP) is an important oral genre for students at the tertiary level. When academic oral presentations (AOPs) are evaluated and graded, the task is challenging (Hadi et al, 2019) and there is anxiety (Kho andTing, 2021, Grieve et al, 2021). Students are afraid of getting evaluated by examiners and have trouble remembering their points which causes anxiety too (Shahar and Abdul Raof, 2021).…”