Oral presentations have been a popular component of foreign language courses for many years, and their prevalence has only grown within English for specific purposes programs throughout the world. “Academic oral presentations in various forms are used for ensuring assessment, presenting research, and socializing students into the discourse of an academic genre” (Barrett & Lui, 2016, p. 1228). In addition, they give our students opportunities to organize and prioritize ideas, and present them orally to an audience, thereby developing communicative skills that arguably will be very useful in the globalized workplaces in which our students will need to function. While they are beneficial in many ways, oral presentations create a range of challenges for students, especially for those working in a foreign language, and, not surprisingly, they often create large amounts of anxiety.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Perhaps nowhere does Lincoln’s value of preparation more clearly play out, and pay off, than in the act of public speaking. Students, however, commonly spend too little time practicing before their presentations, and therefore experience increased levels of anxiety while presenting, which impedes their linguistic performance (MacIntyre, 1995). This makes the experience more daunting and less satisfying, and therefore less motivating (Dornyei, 2014). With this problem in mind, this article briefly evaluates the issue of anxiety within the context of foreign language public speaking and suggests one way to moderate that behavior through the use of technology.

Anxiety

Whether you are teaching a presentation or public speaking class or a content or skills-based course that simply includes one or more presentations, it is important to be sensitive to the anxiety that generally accompanies oral presentations and to strive to alleviate it to the extent possible. Of course, one of the intended benefits of requiring oral presentations is to help students develop skills that position them to effectively moderate and manage their anxiety. There are ways, however, that we as teachers can work to minimize anxiety during this process as well, and it helps to remind one’s self of the complicated role that anxiety plays in public speaking, and in foreign language public speaking in particular. For our language learners, the oral presentation experience brings together two complex, multidimensional types of anxiety: public speaking anxiety, a social anxiety, and language anxiety, a situation-specific anxiety (MacIntyre & MacDonald, 1998). As we have all likely experienced, public speaking anxiety can cause a range of “cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions” and “changes in public speaking anxiety may be substantially affected by the perception of competence as a speaker” (MacIntyre & MacDonald, 1998, pp. 359–360). A feeling of competence is often in short supply in the foreign language classroom, especially when speaking before a group. Additionally, language anxiety has been clearly shown to negatively affect language processing in a “recursive” cycle involving behavioral and cognitive processing demands (MacIntyre, 1995). Clearly, though beneficial, oral presentations are particularly anxiety-provoking for our students. One novel approach to mitigating this high anxiety, in part by promoting practice, is to include a confidence-building presentation involving WeVideo.

Technology: WeVideo

WeVideo is a free, popular video editor app that allows students to import, sequence, and edit photos and video, and then add their own spoken narration on top of the animated slides. This simple but feature-rich app, which is available for both the iPhone and Android phones, has a relatively low learning curve and is perfect for creating oral presentations. Some of its features are highlighted and discussed here.

Photos and Video

One of the really great aspects of a presentation video is that it includes media that students choose and sequence themselves in a format that they seem to innately understand and relate to. Students can import existing photos and video directly from their library or they can readily create new media using their phone, something they are all adept at doing. In addition, they can utilize media from external sources, and this can provide the context for including classroom instruction on how and where to legally find royalty-free image sources, and how to correctly reference those materials. Using their own media gives them an opportunity to combine language with images that are interesting and personally meaningful. Connecting language to existing experiences is a powerful way to drive language development.

In addition, working within this multimodal smartphone environment, which includes pictures, video, text, spoken communication, and even music, promotes the development of multimedia skills, which are becoming more prevalent in “high-quality academic and workplace presentations” (Barrett & Lui, 2016, p. 1229).

Students can organize and edit their visual elements in a variety of ways. They can rotate and flip them. They can add text to photos and video, and this can be used as a meaningful way for students to combine unit-specific vocabulary with media that illustrate the word’s meaning. Students can animate their photos as well. This means that they can zoom in or out from one area of the photo to another over a specified number of seconds. This creates a sense of movement in a photograph but it also allows students to create the bigger picture, or context, and then zoom in to focus attention on a particular element. This feature enables students to visually emphasize points in their narrative and then explain that emphasis with words.

Videos can be edited within the app in all of the same ways mentioned for photo editing. Students can trim from either end of a video, and they can adjust the playback speed as well, which allows for a dramatic narrative effect.

In addition, music can be added from the user’s library or from playlists offered as in-app purchases.

Recording the Audio

One of the more challenging parts of creating a video in WeVideo is the timing of the spoken narrative and the transition of images and video. The duration of images can be set, meaning how long a photo is displayed before transitioning to the next slide. This timing challenge is one of the true benefits of having students work with the app because it necessitates multiple attempts at recording the audio, and this means that students can’t avoid practicing many times. Getting students to earnestly repeat activities or oral output is something we have all found to be challenging, no doubt. This is a sneaky way to do it, and the students seem to simply accept it as a necessary challenge of making a great video. In addition, rerecording increases students’ expectation of success because if they make a mistake, they can simply go back and do it again.

Saving and Sharing

Once the video has been made and students are satisfied, it is a simple process to save it. Doing so places one copy in the camera roll and one in-app. The video can then be shared, adding another powerful advantage to using such technology. The obvious advantage is the social media component, which is easily created using this type of learning technology. By folding the presentation process into a social media context, we are likely adding to its perceived value by making it more relevant to our students, and this increases motivation (Dornyei, 2014).

My students save their videos to our class Facebook page. I require them to watch a specified number of videos and to leave constructive comments. In classes of roughly 30 students, however, every video is viewed more than 20 times, and, generally, the videos are watched by every student without any requirement to do so. They seem to be naturally curious to find out how the other students did. This obviously creates a substantial listening task that students undertake, to a large extent, of their own accord. It also alleviates some of the time pressure that often comes with oral presentations as they can take up enormous amounts of class time. I typically give the students some time in class to watch two to three classmates’ videos, but beyond that they must watch out of class, and this saves a lot of precious time.

Summary

Oral presentations are potentially beneficial in a number of ways. For students working in a foreign language, however, they can be a particularly anxiety-provoking experience. Using a learning technology, like WeVideo, offers students an alternative to a live performance, thereby reducing their anxiety while still providing them with many of the benefits inherent in the process. Along with lowered anxiety, students may feel a heightened expectation of success (through their ability to rerecord) and an increased sense of task value (by adding a social media component). In addition, an increase in practice (through rerecording) results in an increase in verbal output. Watching others’ videos and commenting can lead to large amounts of meaning-focused, interesting listening. In addition to all of that, your students will enjoy the variety that WeVideo represents and they will likely appreciate it very much when you tell them to get out their smartphones.

References

Barrett, N. E., & Liu, G.-Z. (2016). Global trends and research aims for English academic oral presentations: Changes, challenges, and opportunities for learning technology. Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 1227–1271. doi:10.3102/0034654316628296

Dörnyei, Z. (2014). Motivation in second language learning. In M. Celce-Murcia, D. M. Brinton, & M. A. Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language (4th ed., pp. 518–531). Boston, MA: National Geographic Learning/Cengage Learning.

MacIntyre, P. D. (1995). How does anxiety affect second language learning? A reply to Sparks and Ganschow. The Modern Language Journal, 79(1), 90–99. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/329395

Maclntyre, P. D., & MacDonald, J. R. (1998). Public speaking anxiety: Perceived competence and audience congeniality. Communication Education, 47, 359–365. Retrieved from http://petermacintyre.weebly.com/articles-in-refereed-journals.html

Kent Patterson currently teaches EFL at Southern University of Science and Technology in China. He has also taught in Japan, the Czech Republic, Turkey, and the USA. He has taught public speaking/presentation courses over the last 8 years in the Czech Republic and Japan.