Academic Oral Presentation in English: A Case Study of Taiwanese Medical Students
| Autor: | Kang-Jen Tien, 田康人 |
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| Rok vydání: | 2012 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 100 Framed in a sociocultural view and drawing upon a second-language socialization perspective, the present study attempted to capture a holistic understanding of how Taiwanese medical students, engaging in oral presentation activities in a theme-based language class, acculturated into academic discourse and culture and how they interacted with and interpreted academic oral presentations. This dissertation was designed to better understand the academic socialization process of six EFL second-year college medical students when acculturating to academic oral presentations. With the use of alternative multiple methods, primarily from the participants’ perspective through interviews and self-reported data, but also via supplementary sources such as questionnaires, observations, field notes, emails, and document records, several findings can be outlined. With consideration to the oral activity, two constitutive features can be concluded from this community: first, it is a process of non-native-speaker socialization and, second, it is a co-constructed social activity. Although earlier studies (Morita, 2003, 2007; Kobayashi, 2003; Zappa-Hollman, 2007; Yang, 2010) have taken the position of examining and evaluating how their non-native English participants fulfill the standards for an effective presentation set by English-native-speakers, the present study does not hold any assumptions regarding what qualities students should develop. More specifically, according to the findings in this case, the valued qualities of completing a good oral presentation are not pre-determined; instead, students developed their own realizations of what the valued qualities of an academic presentation are through the process of being involved in the socially-constructed activity with other indirect non-native-English speaking participants: the instructor and peers. Such findings add to Duff’s (2003) second language socialization model. Moreover, in terms of participants, despite an oral presentation task generally appearing to be performed solely by a presenter, it in fact entails multiple voices and contributions from all participants in the class and represents a social collaboration relationship among participants at different phases (i.e., before, during and after a presentation). More specifically, all participants acted in multiple roles, contributed various viewpoints, and supplied field experiences and levels of expertise within a shared repertoire, contributing to the presentation event in different ways at different stages. These findings concur with the views of context-sensitive approaches such as the Vygotskian sociocultural and activity theory (e.g., Lantolf, 2000), and language socialization (e.g., Duff, 1995, 2002; Morita, 2000, 2004), for their central spirit looks into the value and influence from social collaboration among all members in the community. However, the current study went one step further to suggest that social collaboration is not a unidirectional transmission pattern from expert to novice. Rather, in the researched context, the transmission pattern could possibly occur among novices, which is evidence of the re-constructed expert-novice dichotomy. To conclude, despite the limited number of participants engaged and the exclusive nature of the research context, the present case study contributes significantly to further understanding second language socialization and provides a different dimension for investigating a theme-based language course. Through examination of how participants engage in oral presentations, the multifaceted inter-relationships represent students’ learning and participants’ interactions within the situated context. This perspective merits further research attention and offers new possibilities in language course construction toward discipline-specific orientations. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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