VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDY
DEPARTMENT OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ BÍCH VÂN

INVESTIGATING HOW TO IMPROVE ORAL PRESENTATION SKILLS
FOR THE SECOND - YEAR ENGLISH MAJORS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF
FOREIGN LANGUAGES AT HUNG YEN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
AND EDUCATION
(TÌM HIỂU CÁCH CẢI THIỆN KĨ NĂNG THUYẾT TRÌNH CHO SINH VIÊN
CHUYÊN ANH NĂM THỨ HAI TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM KĨ THUẬT
HƯNG YÊN) M.A MINOR THESIS
Field: Methodology
Code: 601410


FOREIGN LANGUAGES AT HUNG YEN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
AND EDUCATION
(TÌM HIỂU CÁCH CẢI THIỆN KĨ NĂNG THUYẾT TRÌNH CHO SINH VIÊN
CHUYÊN ANH NĂM THỨ HAI TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM KĨ THUẬT HƯNG
YÊN)

M.A MINOR THESIS
Field: English Methodology
Code: 601410
Supervisor: TRẦN HIỀN LAN, MA
HANOI – 2009
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………i
Declaration……………………………………………………………………………….ii
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….iii
Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………… iv

2.2.3. Data Analysis ………………………………………………………………………….15
2.3. Presentation of Statistical Results……………………………………………… 15
2.3.1. Questionnaire for the Students……………………………………………………….15
2.3.1.1. Methodology…………………………………………………………………………15
2.3.1.2. Statistical results ……………………………………………………………………15
2.3.1.2.1. The students’ perceptions of the necessity of oral presentation skills……………15
2.3.1.2.2. The second- year students’ difficulties in learning presentation skills…… 17
2.3.1.2.3. Current methods used in teaching oral presentation skills to the second- year
English majors……………………………………………………………………………… 21
2.3.1.2.4. The students’ evaluation of the teachers’ current methods………………………24
2.3.1.2.5. The students’ suggested solutions to improve the situations……………………… 24
2.3.2. Questionnaire for the teachers……………………………………………………… 28
2.3.2.1. Methodology…………………………………………………………………………28
2.3.2.2. Statistical results ……………………………………………………………………28
2.3.2.2.1. The teachers’ perceptions of the necessity of oral presentation skill…………… 29
2.3.2.2.2. The teachers’ opinion of presentation skills………………………………………29
2.3.2.2.3. The teachers’ difficulties in teaching presentation skills…………………………30
2.3.2.2.4. Current teaching methods applied for oral presentation skills…………… 32

CHAPTER THREE: FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATION………… 35
2.1. Findings………………………………………………………………………………… 35
2.1.1. The students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the necessity of oral presentation
skills…………………………………………………………………………………… 35
2.1.2. What the teachers know about presentation skills…………………………………….35
2.1.3. The teachers and the students’ difficulties in their teaching and learning of oral
presentations………………………………………………………………………………… 36

vi
2.1.4. The methods the teachers are currently using in teaching presentation skills……… 36
2.1.5. The students’ evaluations of those methods………………………………………… 37

English for their communications as well as oral presentations at work. In reality, most
students leaving college today lack the basic skills necessary for presenting information to a
group. Additionally, many college classes require presentations, but the students are often told
to do it without being shown how to do it. A history professor does not feel it is their job to
show their students the basic skills of presenting a subject. Furthermore, the students aren‟t
given the right feedback to improve. As a matter of fact, learning how to make presentations
effective becomes one of the key institutional parts.

In Hung Yen University of Technology and Education, there are not any separate subjects on
which the English majors‟ presenting skills are trained. It is the teachers of English who teach
them oral presentations skills. For the teachers in the foreign language department there are
some certain advantages of asking students to give presentations on the subject of their
concern. Firstly, it gives students a good opportunity to practice their speaking skill. It also
increases the students‟ confidence in using English. Furthermore, it can be a good practice for
those students who will actually need the skill in their future professional lives. And lastly, it
is an excellent generator of spontaneous discussion. Being well aware of these advantages, all
the teachers who teach English speaking skills regard presentation skills as their main focus in
teaching English. However, it cannot be denied that there exist a lot of problems concerning
our students‟ presentation skills, the most typical of which is the fact that it is quite difficult to
give successful presentations. Having been teaching them for nearly four terms, I have
recognized the main reasons for such difficulties. Firstly, in comparison with other students of
the same major, the students here have much lower level of English proficiency especially in

2
poor pronunciation and poor vocabulary. Secondly, due to their inexperience, the teaching
staff also sees that they lack the basic techniques for teaching students how to give successful
presentations. Lastly, the teaching of English as a major has come into use not for long as a
focus to supply the students with an appropriate syllabus which includes oral presentation. In
fact, to the English majors in here in general and the second- year English majors in particular,
presentation skills are quite new and difficult. This is the reason why I chose to conduct a

The study will be conducted using quantitative and qualitative methods with questionnaires for
informants of 56 second- year majors of English randomly chosen from four classes and 8
teachers at the University of Technology and education in Hung Yen and informal interviews
with the informants and their teachers and personal observation will also be employed.
5. Design of the study:
The study consists of three parts:
Part 1, introduction, presents the rationale, the aims, the scope, the methods and the design
of the study.
Part 2, development, consists of 3 chapters.

+ Chapter I - Literature Review – deals with the concepts relevant to the study: oral
communication, presentation skills and prior studies related to presentation skills.

+ Chapter II - Practical Research – provides an analysis on the current situation of
teaching and learning oral presentation skill and reports the results of the survey research
which was carried out at the beginning of the fourth term of the 2008- 2009 academic year
at the foreign language department, UTEHY. The report includes the followings:

 research questions
 informants
 measurement instruments
 data analysis
 presentation of statistical results 4
+ Chapter III – Findings and recommendation – focuses on difficulties students and
teachers faced in learning and teaching speaking skills in general and presentation skills in
particular. Additionally, it offers pedagogical suggestions for the students, the department
and the teachers to improve their learning and teaching of oral presentation skills.
5
PART 2: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW

In the investigation into ways to develop students‟ speaking ability in general and oral
presentation skill in particular, the researcher needs to present the previous and current
literature on oral presentations with the characteristics of oral presentation and then define oral
communication and some aspects of oral presentations. These issues are the focus of the
chapter.
1.1. Oral Communication

Oral communication is a two- way process between the speaker and the listener( or listeners)
and involves the productive skill of speaking and the receptive skill of understanding( or
listening with understanding) ( Byrne, 1986). It is important to remember that “receptive” does
not mean “passive” when both listening and reading, language users are actively involved in
the process of interpreting and negotiating meanings. To clarify what involves in an oral
communication, it is necessary to discuss the differences in written and spoken language.

According to P. Santry (1999), there are important differences between spoken and written
language. In speech we have a much greater freedom and informality of usage than it is
accepted in writing. We do not speak in limited grammatical sentence structures or follow
formal syntax as the way we do when writing. Moreover, in speech the colloquial forms are
acceptable while they are not in writing. We do not write in the same way we speak because
the two channels are not exactly interchangeable. Byrne (1986) shares the same opinion by

According to Clark, D (see http://www.nwlink.com/ ~donclark/leader/leadpres.html) a good
presentation, firstly, has content, that is it contains information that people need. But unlike
reports, which are read at the reader‟s own pace, presentations must account for how much
information the audience can absorb. Secondly, it has structure with a logical beginning,
middle, and end. It must be sequenced and paced so that the audience can understand it. While
reports have appendices and footnotes to guide the reader, the speaker must be careful not to
lose the audience when wandering from the main point of the presentation. Thirdly, a
presentation is characterized by packaging: It must be well- prepared. A report can be reread

7
and portions skipped over, but with a presentation, the audience has to depend on the
presenter. Finally, a good presentation has human element in it. It will be remembered much
more than a good report because it has a person attached to it.

1.2.2. Oral Presentation Organization
According to P. Santry (1999) and Comfort (1995), an oral presentation consists of three main
parts: the introduction, body and conclusion, in which the introduction aims to “attract the
listeners‟ interest and focus their attention on the topic”. When you give a presentation at
work, listeners usually have an immediate need for the information presented. Therefore, they
have a clear reason to pay attention to the presentation.

Once you have a clear statement of your central idea, you can start developing the body, or
main section, of your presentation. “The body consists of main points that develop your
central idea in detail. These main points need to be arranged in a way that is clear both to you
and to your audience. The organization of your presentation should make it easy for the
audience to understand and to remember the information you present”. (Santry, 1999: 40).
Also in the body, it is the presenter‟s duty to inform, persuade, or entertain the audience. To
succeed in doing this, the presenter has to make the presentation lively and interesting by
including information such as personal experience, examples and illustrations, facts, and
statistics. A relevant personal story or example can make all the differences between a dry

enjoyable classroom atmosphere. In fact, topics are not difficult to find. The important thing is
their appropriateness. He suggests that topics should be consulted with the teacher who will
help assess the level of the difficulty of the given topics in relation to the learners‟ ability.

The procedures for oral presentation have also been discussed by Vo (1994). According to him
the following procedure should be taken into considerations when teachers want to assign oral
presentation as homework:
1. At the beginning of the term, announce to the students that they all will have
an opportunity to speak in front of the group.
2. Put up a large calendar so that students can pick up the date they prefer

9
3. After the break of every class session, have one student come forward and
speak about the topic he or she chose.
4. During the speech, the teacher should sit in the audience
5. Have each student speak for about five minutes.
6. Have the other class members hold their questions and comments until the
speaker has finished. (The teacher and other students can help the speaker
answer very difficult questions).
7. After each speech, give the speaker(s) some feedback. ( Psychologically,
compliments should come before criticism so as to encourage the student).

Jane King (2002) focuses much on the teacher‟s role when he/she works with students on oral
presentations. According to him this “is a challenging job for teachers because it not only
involves training in other disciplines such as speech communication and public speaking, but
also demands more of teachers in terms of time and effort in lesson planning and teaching
strategies”. He also adds that “on the student's part, the student-centered activity asks students
to be responsible for their own learning. When a teacher moves from the traditional role of
teacher as an authoritative expert to the new role of facilitator of learning, students feel a
drastic change. With such a student-led activity as oral presentation, teachers need to have

specialized knowledge experience. Technical professionals may be called on to give progress
reports, explain research, discuss company policies, analyze problems, offer
recommendations, or give on- the- job instructions. In addition, they may give oral
presentations to company more formal written reports such as project proposals, budget
proposals, or feasibility studies”. Moreover, they do not touch upon the problems that
language learners have when giving oral presentations in the classroom setting and the reasons
why they experience such problems. Also, the solutions/ suggestions given from those books
are not drawn from their own research or in other words, they were not research- based. They
are somehow based on the writers‟ own observations and perceptions so the solutions tend to
be applicable for some subjects. 11
In Vietnam, there have been a lot of studies on oral communication skills and many of them
are presented in M.A theses. However, oral presentations have not been extensively
investigated. The M.A thesis “A Study on Oral Presentation Difficulties of Second- Year
English Majors of Phuong Dong University in the Speaking Lessons” by Nguyen Thi Van Ha
(2007) is known to be the only one ever which mostly focuses on second- year English
majors‟ difficulties in giving oral presentations. The researcher also gives some suggested
solutions to such problems but this is quite general. For that reason, I decided to have my own
research in which I try to have an investigation of the second- year major students‟ difficulties
when giving oral presentations and of the difficulties the teachers of English in the Department
of Foreign Language, HYUTE have been encountering and I would like to give some
suggestions as well as solutions helping both the teachers and the students teach and learn oral
presentation skills efficiently.
intermediate, Inside- out Intermediate, Inside- out advanced), IELTs series for reading,
listening and writing. The second- year students are required to achieve the intermediate level
in speaking ability, which is the ability to “communicate successfully in many social situations
and to express themselves persuasively with a number of strategies appropriate to a range of
circumstances and topics”. (HYUTE‟ speaking syllabus for 2
nd
English majors- 2007). The
total time allowed for speaking skills for the fourth term for HYUTE majors is 60 class hours.
The syllabus is theme- based, as briefed below: (Refer to appendix 3 for the list of topics that
we worked on in the fourth term)
 Time (9 class hours)
 Journey ( 9 class hours)
 Basics ( 9 class hours)
 Communication ( 9 class hours)
 Style ( 9 class hours)

13
 Age ( 9 class hours)
For that reason the speaking classes often focus on common sub-skills like debating, arguing,
discussing, and presenting. Right at the beginning of the fourth term, teachers and students are
given a list of topics. To prepare for the class activities, the students are asked to search for as
many relevant reading passages as they could from available sources like the internet,
newspapers and magazines. More importantly, basing on the materials they have found, the
second- year students are asked to review them in the light of the week‟s topic. By doing so,
students‟ presentation skill is often practiced and is considered the main activity during the
speaking classes.
2.1.2. The informants
The research was undertaken with the participation of 56 students who were randomly chosen
from 115 students of the four classes, in which 52 were female and 4 were male and 8 teachers
in the group of English practical skills.

2.2. The Study
2.2.1. The Research Questions
In order to uncover the difficulties of the second- year English majors at HYUTE and to
investigate ways to improve their presentation skills, the researcher carries out this research
and aim at answering the following questions:

1) What are the students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the necessity of oral presentation
skills?
2) How much do the teachers know about presentation skills?
3) What are the teachers and the students’ difficulties in their teaching and learning of oral
presentations?
4) What methods are the teachers currently using in teaching presentation skills?
5) What are the students’ evaluations of those methods?
6) What do the students think should be done for them to improve their oral presentation
skills?
2.2.2. Measurement Instruments.

15
To have a good understanding of the issues under discussion, it is essential to refer to an
important source of data collection associated with the literature review. The researcher hopes
to give some suggestions and suggested teaching techniques that can be worked out to
improve current presentation skill teaching and learning at HYUTE by means of literature
comparison and by cross- checking with the information obtained from the responded
questionnaires.
2.2.3. Data Analysis
Data analysis is not a single description of the data collected but a process by which the
researcher interprets the data. The scheme and coding table in this research emerged from an
examination of the data rather than being determined beforehand and imposed on the data.
2.3. Presentation of Statistical Results
2.3.1. Questionnaire for the Students


B

C

D

Question 1
How necessary do you think it is to learn
oral presentation skills in your speaking
class?
A. Necessary
B. Rather necessary
C. A little necessary
D. Not necessary at all

85%

13%
future.
 Others (Please give other reasons
of your own choice
here)……………………………… 0% 20%
means having confidence, courage, and good knowledge” or “the very good thing the learning
of oral presentations brings to me is the experience of standing in front of a crowd speaking,
proving, explaining, or persuading and that is also what I’ll have to do in my future jobs”.
2.3.1.2.2. The second- year students’ difficulties in learning presentation skills
Presentation skills are new among the second- year students in the department of foreign
languages so it is not surprised when all the students (100%) choose option A for question 3
which shows the fact that all the students thought presentation skills were difficult but
interesting. The table below will help to prove this:
18
Options

Questions A

B

C

D

E


support the main point is quite difficult.
C. Rehearsing the speech is sometimes boring
D. Memorizing your speech word for word is
difficult
18%
32%
16%
34%

53%

64%

12%

12%

19
E. I can never present fluently


82%
21%
14%
5%
Question 7
What do you think are the causes of such
difficulties? (You can tick more than one)
A. Our English proficiency is quite low

difficult: making a detailed outline for the topic (32%) and memorizing the speech word for
word (34%). There were only 10 students (18%) who thought that the step of searching for
ideas for the topic was difficult as not every given topic was of easy understandings; and 9 of
them (16%) thought rehearsing the speech was sometimes boring.

20
Not only does the preparation stage become such hard work for the students, but the stage of
delivering a presentation (question 5) is difficult as well. Overall, the majority of them (64%)
considered their lack of confidence in front of the audience a big challenge because, as they
explained, their feelings of nervous, uncomfortable, and embarrassed often made them forget
nearly all what had been prepared. Moreover, there were 29 students (52%) who shared the
idea that they were quite clumsy in using body language such as eye contact, facial expression,
body movements, or hand gestures. Only 13 of them (23%) thought that how to make a good
voice variation was difficult. It could be good news as only 7 students (12%) find it difficult to
handle with the audience‟s questions and so was the job of presenting the speech fluently. The
reason, as they stated, was that the feelings of self- confident and relaxed were the key factors
to help them overcome all other difficulties which were minor ones only. Beside, some of
them claimed that their difficulties in delivering a presentation could also be seen in their lack
of vocabulary and incorrect pronunciation. “Sometimes my lack of vocabulary put myself in an
embarrassing situation where I could think of no appropriate words or phases to express my
points” or “I am sure that my presentation could have gone better if I had not made so much
incorrect pronunciation, which made the audience confused sometimes”

Difficulties in giving a good content of a presentation (question 6) were believed to be worth
discussing by the students. According to most of them – 46 students (82%), a presentation
only has its good content when one knows how to support for the main points, that is, giving
supporting ideas for the main points is the most difficult of all. Beside, nearly half of them –
27 students (48%) thought they have difficulty in presenting with good accuracy of word uses,
expressions, and pronunciation, without which they could not be successful in giving the
clarity of ideas. Other aspects were also difficult, but for them they were not much. For