Students'' Perceptions of Making PowerPoint Presentations for Business Purposes

• Main Authors: Wen-Hsiu Yang, 楊雯琇
• Other Authors: Chi-Fen Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/24063618588735761799

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語研究所 === 101 === With the growing development of teaching language for specific purposes, branches of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) have been developed including English for Business Purposes (EBP). From the industry perspectives, the competence of making effective communication at the workplace is crucial for college students. In particular, making PowerPoint presentations is one of the most common oral communication skills in business and it has received greater attention in recent years. How to use PowerPoint effectively in presentations has became a survival skill for students who wish to succeed in business in the future. Though PowerPoint is a powerful and ubiquitous presentation technology; there are limited studies investigating students’ use of this technology in making oral presentations, especially in the EBP field. The purpose of the present study is to explore students’ perception, performance, and difficulties in making effective PowerPoint presentations for business purposes. Therefore, the researcher conducted a study using a questionnaire and interviews as research instruments. Sixty-five English majors from two different classes participated in the study. In order to compare less experienced students and more experienced students, 43 sophomores and 24 seniors were invited to voluntarily participate in the study. Besides, a number of student’s PowerPoint slides were used as supplemental data to the students’ questionnaire responses. In order to investigate students’ perception, performance, and difficulties in making business presentations using PowerPoint, the researcher developed five dimensions consisting of (1) contextual awareness, (2) information literacy, (3) background knowledge, (4) language use, and (5) visual design. According to the statistical results of the questionnaire responses, the two classes showed more similarities in both perception and difficulty part, but they showed more differences in the performance part. In the perception part, both groups of students responded that information literacy was important. As for their difficulties, students had difficulties in background knowledge and information literacy. In their perceived performance with supplement of the students’ PowerPoint slides, two groups of students had significant differences in contextual awareness, language use and visual design. The seniors considered contextual awareness more important than the sophomores, especially regarding the audience awareness. Therefore, they paid more attention to the audience’s needs or expectations when designing slides. Moreover, the seniors’ slides had more effective language use and visual design than the sophomores’ slides. According to the interviews with the students, the reasons for their differences could probably because of their instructor’s teaching emphasis and their understanding of what business presentations should be. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications are provided in the end.