Virtual Professional Communication Project Presentation: Examining Students’ Speaking Anxiety in a Malaysian Public University

Abstract

ELS304 Professional Communication Exercise is a final semester course that the LG120 Diploma in English for Professional Communication students must complete before graduating and was offered for the first time in September 2020 via Open Distance Learning (ODL). For this, students are required to undertake a project that is related to their field of study and present it to a panel of examiners consisting of faculty lecturers and industry panel members. As carrying out the presentation in English was already stressful enough for the students, the presence of these external examiners could lead to a higher level of stress and anxiety. With this in mind, this study intends to examine the students’ perceptions of communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation and anxiety during the final course presentation and whether the presence of these two additional factors, the ODL method and the inclusion of external examiners could cause communication apprehension on the part of the students that could lead to additional emotional pressure, fear and anxiety. The purposive sampling method was used to obtain responses from 63 final semester LG120 Diploma in English for Professional Communication students from Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Cawangan Melaka and Johor who had recently completed the ELS304 Professional Communication Exercise course and had gone through the online presentation involving external examiners. The instrument for this study was administered using Google Forms, which utilized a 5-point rating scale for three components categorized as Communication Apprehension, Fear of Negative Feedback and Test Anxiety. The findings revealed that this group of LG120 students who conducted the presentation of their final project via ODL and in the presence of industry panel members generally experienced a moderate to high level of anxiety. Several other conclusions were made based on the findings. Overall, this study has shown that, although the mode of this assessment was changed to ODL, similar anxiety factors in public speaking that affect students remained a constant presence.