Abstract:

Since presentation preparation is seen as a skill necessary in both academic and future employment contexts, university students are expected to dedicate time and attention to foster this skill. In this study, Lithuanian students studying English as a foreign language (EFL) at Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) were given almost three months to prepare for their online presentation, which had to have both the speaking part and slides that would be demonstrated while speaking. This project, carried out by the students, lasted almost the whole semester and had to be done all those months step by step, as certain aspects of presentations were introduced, clarified and practiced in the classes of the course they attended. By using an online questionnaire the study aimed to find out whether and how these students prepared for their presentations in advance, whether they invested their time in them by seeing presentation preparation as a process and how ready they felt about giving those presentations in an online class, because their EFL classes were delivered online during the coronavirus pandemic. Since most of earlier research in the EFL context had focused on the process approach to writing, the present study located itself in a quite underexplored area by adopting the same approach to presentation preparation. The findings revealed that not all the students understood the importance of preparation for presentations and did not see the process approach as necessary. Even though they were given a lot of time, in fact, much more time than they actually needed, a substantial amount of them did not use it efficiently and effectively. Around a third of all the students involved in the study had not started doing anything for their presentations when a week or less was left until the actual presentation. In addition, the students evaluated their online presentation skills well, even though almost a half of them had not practiced giving a presentation on the platform they would need to do it in their English class. On the one hand, it seemed that tentative deadlines that they needed to observe themselves in the presentation preparation process did not help much without the teacher overseeing them, but on the other hand, the majority of the students employed the process approach to a greater or lesser extent.

Keywords:

EFL, oral presentations, process approach, preparation for presentations, process of preparation.