Teaching and Assessment of Oral Presentations in Zoom: Developing Empirically-informed Materials and Guidelines for CityU-Learning

Description

COVID-19 has dramatically altered the ecology of social interactions and posed major challenges for the assessment of English language speaking activities that were designed to be face-to-face.Individual and group oral presentations offer a case in point because teaching and assessment materials generally assume that the speaker presents against a backdrop of slides in front of anaudience with whom he or she must interact. This situation relies on a particular embodied participation framework or “small ecology in which different signs in different media (talk, thegesturing body and objects in the world) dynamically interact” (Goodwin, 2007, p. 199). Teaching and assessing oral presentations online inevitably changes this ecology with regards to the dynamics of the interaction between the speaker, audience, and slides. How is the speaker-audience-slide interplay affected by the online environment? What are the implications for the linguistic,interactional, and social skills that our students use, need, lack, and can or cannot be expected to demonstrate when assessed? To answer these questions, an enactive-ecological approach will beapplied to analyzing a corpus of individual and group PowerPoint presentations delivered in Zoom. Building on the principal investigator’s research in English for Academic Purposes (Harrison, 2020a, under revision), the proposed project will deliver empirically-informed materials and guidelines for Proposal No. STDG20B008 2 teaching and assessing oral presentations online at CityU.D. Keywords