Enhancing Learners’ Communicative Competence Through Oral Presentations

Abstract

As a matter of fact, oral presentations are among the most important “learner centered activities” that have been widely used in the majority of foreign language teaching and learning contexts to improve learners’ communicative competence. Within the classroom situation, oral presentations are one of the best activities that provide students with the opportunity to practice the target language effectively, interact with each other and most importantly enhance their communicative skills. In this concern, the present study aims at investigating namely the impact of classroom oral presentations on students’ communicative competence. At this end, the case study used is third year LMD students of the English department at Guelma University. This research attempts to investigate the relationship that exists between the two variables by hypothesizing that if students make oral presentations, their communicative competence would rise. Hence, to confirm the validity of this hypothesis, we have adopted a quantitative descriptive method that aimed at gathering valuable as well as reliable data from the students’ questionnaire, which was administered to 110 students from a population that contains 154 students. The results obtained from this questionnaire strongly advocate the reasonably positive correlation between classroom oral presentations and students’ communicative competence. Accordingly, we believe that both students and teachers should be aware about the effectiveness of oral presentations and its positive impact on learners’ communicative competence. Thus, we advocate the importance of adopting classroom oral presentations as an effective pedagogical activity that plays an important role in enhancing students’ communicative competence.