Raising students’ audience awareness for oral presentation through online role-reversal

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate how college students, who studied English as a Foreign Language (EFL), enhanced their audience awareness through online role-reversal to improve oral presentation. Twenty-eight college students volunteered to participate in a speaking training class. They underwent four phases of online role-reversal, peer modeling, peer feedback, peer assessment, and reflections on their scripts for better oral presentation. Data collected included the log files of online role-reversal, students’ first and final scripts, the evaluation rubric of presentation, and an open-ended questionnaire. Results showed that online role-reversal played a key role in raising the students’ audience awareness between presenters and audience, leading to oral presentation improvement. Specifically, the active students outperformed the passive students in the dimensions of content, logical structure, delivery manners, and interaction with peers. The active students experienced online role-reversal to a greater extent and produced better quality final scripts and oral presentations while the passive students made very few revisions on errors of content and structure. They merely copied peers’ feedback for grammatical corrections. This study suggests that students are engaged in online role-reversal to negotiate meaning, deal with difficulties, and reflect on their scripts to enhance audience awareness and consequently improve their oral presentation.