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Enhancing international baccalaureate students’ speaking ability through oral presentations

Abstract:

This study aims at analyzing international baccalaureate students’ perspectives towards how taking part in oral presentations influences their English speaking skills. Forty-one students participated in the study; 27 students were enrolled in the second year of the international baccalaureate program at a public high school in Ecuador and 14 in the third year of the same program. The participants of the study completed a questionnaire that was composed of thirteen Likert Scale items. In the questionnaire, students reported whether some points had increased or improved a lot, moderately, little, or very little. The data was analyzed by conducting a factorial analysis of main components with a Varimax rotation system. The results show that the participants’ speaking skills have been positively influenced in four areas; improvement of students’ oral discourse, responses processing, vocabulary and grammatical construction, and non-verbal interaction. These four factors explain the 72.16% of the variance. Age and sex had no impact on the results.