Reducing accounting students' oral communication apprehension: Empirical evidence

Abstract

Although communication skills are recognized as crucially important to success in the accounting profession, the issue of oral communication (OC) skills development has not been widely examined in accounting education studies. Further, some have questioned whether a program can be designed to effect significant gains in OC skills in relatively short periods, given the resource constraints often associated with accounting programs. One important facet of OC is oral communication apprehension (OCA) -anxiety related to interpersonal OC. Since OCA has been linked to OC skills as well as other communication behaviors, reducing OCA is a step towards improving OC skills. We describe an experimental, undergraduate accounting course that had reducing students' OCA as one of its main objectives. Pretest and posttest measures of OCA for treatment and control groups of accounting majors indicated a significant reduction in OCA for the treatment group but not the control group. This suggests that significant reductions in OCA can be made in a single course. The implications of such short-term gains in reducing OCA are that accounting educators should not necessarily presume that limited resources impose a prohibitive constraint on the inclusion of procedures to reduce OCA in accounting curricula, and should consider incorporating exercises such as those described in this study in their courses where appropriate. Further research is needed to help guide these efforts, however, for OCA remains an underexamined phenomenon in accounting education.