Is There a Relationship between Communications Strategies and Fear of Oral Presentation?

Abstract

The ability to communicate clearly and effectively contributes significantly to presentation success. Unfortunately, communication barriers can prohibit students from accurately conveying and accepting the messages by others to exchange their knowledge, opinions, and ideas. Previous research evidence has indicated that many students experience fear in oral presentation. This study aims to explain the influence in communication strategies and fear of oral presentation among the postgraduate students in public university. This quantitative survey was used towards 41 respondents who participated in this study. There are three sections in the instrument in which section A consists of the demographic profile and Section B has 25 items on communication strategies and section C has 14 items on causes of fear. This study found that in communication strategies there are five strategies that could help the students to strategize their presentation through social-affective strategies, fluency-oriented strategies, negotiation for meaning strategies, accuracy-oriented strategies, and message reduction, orientation and non-verbal strategies. While fear of oral presentation can stem from two sources and there are external and internal factors, the external factors such as fear of the marks that they will receive and the internal factors such as feeling nervous are the most feared factors among the all factors that the students’ faced. This study has successfully proven the similarity of previous scholars' findings through the findings from recent studies. Therefore, it is very significant to continue the research in future due to different challenges and constraints in performing oral presentations. By identifying problems and challenges through comprehensive research, solutions can be improved over time.