TEFL trainees’ attitude to and self-efficacy beliefs of academic oral presentation

Abstract

AbstractAn oral presentation is an essential skill for successful academic and professional careers. Trainees’ attitudes and self-efficacy beliefs about oral presentation play significant roles in their oral presentation development in a foreign language context. Accordingly, this study aimed to explore TEFL trainees’ attitudes to and self-efficacy beliefs of oral presentation and the association between the two variables. A concurrent mixed-methods design was adopted to address the research questions. A systematic random sampling technique was employed to select 150 M.A. trainees at post course works from four public universities in Ethiopia. However, only 123 (82%) filled out and returned attitude and self–efficacy beliefs scale questionnaires. Besides, five trainees were randomly selected for retrospective interviews. Mean scores, standard deviation, Pearson product-moment correlation, ANOVA and Post hoc methods were utilized to analyze quantitative data, while thematic verbal descriptions were employed to analyze the qualitative data. The questionnaires and interviews showed that TEFL trainees had highly favorable attitudes toward oral presentation. Although the results from the questionnaire indicated the trainees had high self-efficacy beliefs towards oral presentation, the interview revealed they had middling confidence in an oral presentation due to their poor English language proficiency, as English is a foreign language to them. Moreover, a positive and significant moderate correlation was found between the trainees’ attitudes to and self-efficacy beliefs of oral presentations.

Keywords

• attitude
• academic presentation
• attitude to oral presentation
• oral presentation
• self-efficacy beliefs