Abstract:

Unlike reading and writing, oral communications involve two-way communications between the speaker and the receiver. Apart from the speaker and the receiver, there are many elements involved in the process of communication (Nunan, 1989). These elements include a source, stimuli received from that source, a receiver, sensory receptors, the receiver’s interpretation of and responses to the sensations, noise, feedback, and situation or context. These make it challenging to teach even face-to-face. With the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted education of nearly 1.4 billion students of all ages around the world (UNESCO, 2020) and has forced the entire world to rely on e-learning for education, the teaching of oral communication has become more challenging in many ways. As we move toward the normalization of hybrid education (MEXT, 2021; Keidanren, 2021), we need to think of ways to make our teaching curriculum work effectively. To address this need, we examined the issues and needs to enhance the English oral communication skills of high-mid-low English proficient college students conducted online in Japan. Specifically, we looked at the students’ satisfaction of the online speaking classes, their speaking confidence, ease of communication with their classmates and teachers, and the online tools, which were utilized in the online speaking classes. Although there is a growing research on online instructions in Japan, there is a limited study on creating effective and sustainable curriculum guides to enhance oral communication skills in the normalizing stage of hybrid education era, so we will use the data with this main goal in mind. The data will also be useful not only for teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL), but all teachers who teach online classes that require any form of oral communication.

Keywords:

Online learning, synchronous learning, English as a foreign language, oral communication, speaking, speaking confidence, online speaking classes.