This research aims to investigate the effects of presentation discourse marker class for international students enrolled in Korean colleges on their academic oral presentation skills. The students subject to this research are exposed to wide-ranging a...
This research aims to investigate the effects of presentation discourse marker class for international students enrolled in Korean colleges on their academic oral presentation skills. The students subject to this research are exposed to wide-ranging academic situations while studying in Korea including listening to lectures, writing s, preparing for tests, and participating in presentations and discussions. For such experiences, speaking skills are very important, and for international students to actively participate in such situations, they need to become familiar with various forms of speech including formal speech such as making presentations at the college level. This research suggests presentation discourse maker classes as an effective method to foster presentation skills at the college level. Learning various discourse markers needed for presentations will serve as an excellent tool to facilitate efficient presentations.
This research experimented with eleven sophomore students studying at the College of Economics and Business at “K University” located in Seoul, Korea. The research is organized as follows.
Chapter 1 describes the necessity and goals for the research. The research views presentations to be important in academic situations for international students studying at Korean colleges, and specifically suggests presentation discourse marker classes. Two categories of existing studies were also reviewed in this chapter, namely, researches on learning and teaching discourse markers, and researches on academic oral presentations. Against the background of existing researches, the research questions to be investigated are presented. Many education methods may exist for enhancing academic oral presentation skills, but this research focuses on the utilization of presentation discourse markers to investigate its effect, and have, therefore, set three research questions.
The first research question investigates the effect of presentation discourse marker classes by conducting a qualitative analysis on the frequency of the utilization of presentation discourse markers along with the error frequency in the pretests and posttests. The next research question looks into the educational treatment effect by investigating whether the presentation scores in the posttests were statistically significant after using score-sheets for evaluation in the pretests and post-tests. The third research question examines the attitude of the participants during presentation discourse marker classes and the opinions of the participants on the educational effect of such classes.
Chapter 2 covers researches on presentation discourses, presentation discourse markers, and academic oral presentations as the theoretical background for this research. Chapter 3 describes the research methods, and experiment design and process to verify the research questions presented in the first chapter. Chapter 4 reveals the experiment results and discusses the interpretation of the results. Chapter 5 presents the conclusion along with the limitations and implications of the research.
An analysis of the research questions results in the following. First, the research examined whether there were any differences in the frequency of utilizing presentation discourse markers after learning about the markers. An analysis of the frequency by various functions in the pretests and posttests reveals an increase in the frequency in the posttests. Based on the prediction that there may be differences in the rate of increase in the frequencies according to various functions compared to the pretests, such differences were analyzed and there were larger differences in the increase of frequencies in the following order: focus > presenting topics > proposition, refreshing the memory of the audience, completing topics > listing in order >additional explanation. The use of the focus function which considers the audience enhances the quality of presentations, and therefore, the fact that the frequency of this function increased proves the effect of presentation discourse marker classes.
A look at the error frequency difference between the pretests and posttests shows a decrease in the error frequency in the posttests. A sharp decrease in the error frequency of presentation discourse markers for the function of presenting topics could be observed in the posttests compared to the pretests. Many errors were also found in presentation discourse markers for the function of focus due to the increase in the frequency of utilizing such markers. In particular, the error of excessively using discourse markers could be observed, and this is assessed to be a form of training error triggered by lecturers emphasizing the importance of certain functions when teaching discourse markers. No errors were found in using discourse markers for the function of refreshing the memory of the audience. Therefore, although the frequency of utilizing discourse markers for the function of refreshing the memory of the audience was not high, they were used accurately. There was a student who did not use any markers. Although the markers themselves may not be difficult expressions, the student in question was not able to easily use markers for they need to be used in the appropriate situation and context.
Secondly, a statistical analysis of the presentation evaluation results before and after presentation discourse marker classes reveals higher posttest scores compared to the pretests. The impact of presentation discourse marker classes on academic presentation skills was investigated using the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test conducted to verify the research questions. The results revealed a significant educational effect of presentation discourse marker classes.
Thirdly, most of the students were affectively satisfied with presentation discourse marker classes opened for this research. The students in the test group had a higher interest for presentation discourse markers after the classes and recognized the importance of such markers in making presentations. They viewed the classes to be necessary to international students. They also thought that the appropriate use of presentation discourse markers would increase the effectiveness of their presentations. The fact that the students themselves recognized the importance of presentation discourse markers and the actual qualitative changes in the use of discourse markers in the posttests makes possible a positive interpretation. As can be seen, this research has contributed to the study of academic oral presentations which has relatively few existing researches in the field of Korean language education by proving the positive effect of presentation discourse marker classes. Against the backdrop of such results, future researches need to be conducted from various perspectives.
，韩语论文，韩语论文范文 |
