Oral presentation modeling in the EFL classroom

The development of students? oral communicative competence in English is one goal of EFL courses at the tertiary level. Creating and delivering English oral presentations is a useful tool to improve learners? ability to communicate, and a major professional skill in students? future careers. In the context of oral presentations, various language skills are practiced: reading academic articles, composing both a coherent speech and content for a visual aid, and primarily speaking. Yet, students may face difficulties when they prepare for and deliver their presentations. This task is both linguistically challenging for non-native speakers of English and it is a cause of anxiety, nervousness, and lack of confidence. An effective way to ease these hardships is to use modeling, an instructional strategy in which the teacher demonstrates a process or a product that is representative of the skill or content the learners are expected to perform themselves. The teacher has to provide specific details so that students know what to do each step of the way. The purposes of this lecture are to demonstrate how an oral presentation task was modeled to students in a university EFL classroom and more specifically, how this modeling contributed to learners? comprehension and execution of the task.