Mastering Presenters by Means of Visual Aids: Assessing Students' Oral Presentations

Abstract

The introduction of the ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) in education has set a new paradigm in knowledge acquisition. The Internet, overhead projectors and interactive boards, presentation and animation software, and online databases are only some resources that teachers use in order to present information in a more dynamic, immediate, and stunning way, transforming and revitalizing the teaching-learning process. The ICTs have been established in the university classroom and nowadays, they have become an essential part in this teaching-learning process. Lecturers make use of them in the same proportion as they make of traditional materials. At the same time, students have to be acquainted with these new technologies and they also have to be able to deal with them. The objective of this paper is twofold: On the one hand, we study and show how our students make use of the technologies when they have to face their oral presentations in the subject “Advanced English: Professional Settings” (English Studies Degree at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain). It is acknowledged that visual aids can be helpful to support a speech, but we want to analyze if the visual aids are successfully applied, how and to which extent. On the other hand, we want to make out the opinions of their classmates about the use of these graphical resources (students fill in a questionnaire about the effectiveness of the visual aids in their classmates’ presentations and how they would improve them). Results demonstrate that not only teachers make advantage of the new technological resources, we show, based on the students’ oral presentations and their peer-reviews, that also our university students are increasingly aware of the advantage and importance of the ICTs in the classroom.