The openings and endings of students’ spoken academic presentations

Abstract

Oral Academic Presentation is one of the formal speaking activities done in the classroom whether in group or individually for the academic and professional purposes among tertiary level of students. The majority of the students seem to have problems in terms of language aspect and the organizational pattern of the presentations. The goal of this study was to observe on the students’ oral academic presentation emphasizing on the way students used to begin and end the academic presentations in Communicative English classroom. This study aims to examine the way students handle the group presentations in opening and ending the presentation and also the linguistic difficulties encountered by students. The analysis has been done on the 75 corpus gathered from 20 academic groups presentations among semester three and five students at Polytechnic in Kuantan. The group presentations were audio recorded for four hours, two minutes and 41 seconds consisted of 17159 words. The presentations text were transcribed in Word document and tagged manually according to the area of this study. The findings revealed that the majority of students have major problem in linguistic difficulties which are due to the avoidance of several important elements in the presentation: lack of transitionalmarkers used at the beginnings and endings the presentations to produce a cohesive and organized presentation. It suggests that the students need to be scaffolded in order to improve the language use in the presentation. Thus, a few suggestions have been suggested from the findings focusing on the role of lecturers in providing sufficient guidelines for organizing oral academic presentations for student.