PechaKucha Presentations: Teaching Storytelling, Visual Design, and Conciseness

The Effect of Pecha Kucha Presentations on Students’ English Public Speaking Anxiety

“…As pk is a rigorous presentation style with time limitation, students have to practice and rehearse several times with a timer before the presentation. In other words, this presentation format forces the students to practice intensively as they cannot depend on text-heavy slides during presentations (Baker, 2014;Klentzin et al, 2010;Lucas & Rawlins, 2015). Because students are wellprepared for the real performance, it is likely that their public speaking anxiety will be reduced.…”

“…According to these researchers, pk presentation format contributes to students' confidence to speak English in public. It is also believed that pks improve not only students' presentation skills but also their confidence in public speaking by helping them overcome speech anxiety (Lucas & Rawlins, 2015).…”

“…Similarly, motivating students to practice speech by means of repetition and rehearsal is known to be a useful way to reduce public speaking anxiety, and thus to raise confidence in speaking (Liao, 2014). In a foreign language classroom, students tend to have the feeling that pk presentation is shorter and more manageable than the traditional presentation style and, consequently, they become more motivated to rehearse and practice for it (Lucas & Rawlins, 2015;Shiobara, 2015).…”

“…According to many researchers, pk is one of the presentation styles enabling students to practice speech, and thus lowering their English public speaking anxiety (Swathipatnaik & Davidson, 2016). Lucas and Rawlins (2015) also found in their study that pk helped students handle public speaking anxiety by focusing on "how short a time they have for each slide instead of thinking about how long they have to talk" (p. 106). Specifically for the language classroom, pk is believed to lead students to feel that the presentation is short enough to accomplish, which motivates them to spend more time practicing and rehearsing pk presentations than they do for traditional presentations (Shiobara, 2015).…”

“…Although chit-chat is an informal talk, the originators of the idea seem to use the term ironically as they developed pk as an alternative to long, wordy, and boring PowerPoint presentations often neglecting the use of images (Lucas & Rawlins, 2015). According to the official website (http://www.pechakucha.org/), pk requires the presentation of 20 slides, each of which can be displayed for 20 seconds.…”