Public Speaking and Self-Efficacy in the Language Classroom
By: Heather Kretschmer
The woman sat in the first row of the large lecture hall full of fellow faculty members and listened to the speakers present one by one as she waited for her turn to speak. Closer and closer her presentation time approached. Her stomach churned. Her heart started racing. She took slow, deep breaths, which didn’t help one bit. “It’s not fair,” she thought grimly to herself. After all, her presentation would take less than five minutes; she had practiced what she was going to say; and while she wasn’t a native speaker in the language she was presenting in, she was fluent. She rolled her eyes at herself because she had given presentations in her native language without feeling quite so anxious. Why did presenting in a foreign language have to be so nerve-wracking?
When it was finally her turn, she walked up to the podium, her whole body shaking. She turned, looked out into the audience . . . and saw black spots creep into her vision. Taking a shaky breath, she managed to get through what she wanted to say. Although she made it back to her seat without fainting, she felt deeply ashamed of her stage fright.
Public speaking is tough in our native language. Doubly so in a foreign language. This is something language teachers always keep in mind, especially when asking students to perform speaking tasks like doing presentations or role plays in front of the class. Therefore, when we assign speaking tasks, we need to help students develop their public speaking skills in small steps. In our March Think Tank issue, we took a first foray into different ways language teachers can give students valuable opportunities to practice their public speaking skills. How else might we support students?
Our main video provides some advice for teachers. When working with primary school children, teachers can give them opportunities to tell stories. This might involve students sharing stories from their day, having them take turns to read stories aloud, or letting them create stories together. To give students valuable presentation practice, teachers might first have students present in their seats in groups of four to six students and then have groups of two to three stand up and present to the whole class. In middle and high schools, teachers should give students explicit guidance on how to present effectively, including eye contact, body language, and intonation.
These tips are an excellent starting point as they all involve giving school-aged students valuable, age-appropriate practice opportunities for speaking in front of peers and teachers. They also are good speaking activities for adult language learners. But after reflecting on the presentation scenario at the beginning of the article, I would argue that while practice opportunities and targeted instruction are essential, they are not enough. Despite practicing her presentation in advance, the woman was still visibly nervous and felt physically ill before and during her actual presentation. What else was at play in that situation?
In a nutshell, her belief in her ability to present in the foreign language.
Because the woman didn’t really believe that she could succeed in performing that particular task, she experienced the adrenaline coursing through her system as debilitating. In our more podcast episode, Kathy Brooke explains that while some people interpret this adrenaline rush as excitement and feel energized by it, others feel anxious and may not perform to the best of their ability. This performance anxiety is rooted in feeling exposed and vulnerable, experiencing the pressure of performing, and fearing failure.1
1 For more ideas on helping students deal with stress and performance anxiety in test situations check out my article in the November 2022 Think Tank issue.
Interpreting your body’s increase in adrenaline as excitement is easier to do when you actually believe you are able to carry out a task. This is self-efficacy, our belief concerning what we’re capable of accomplishing in a particular situation (link). Your self-efficacy has an impact on how you engage with tasks. First, it influences whether you will even try to deal with a situation, as you’ll tend to avoid perceived threats that you believe you won’t be able to overcome. Even if you are willing to engage with a task, having low self-efficacy may mean you aren’t willing to put in much effort to succeed. Instead, you may fixate on your shortcomings and zero in on potential difficulties, resulting in stress and decreased performance. Conversely, if your self-efficacy for a certain task is high, you’re more likely to approach it with confidence. You’ll be more likely to focus your attention on what you need to do to accomplish the task, viewing obstacles as surmountable challenges that inspire you to put in the effort necessary to overcome them (link).2
2 To read more on self-efficacy in the language classroom, check out our February 2020 Think Tank issue.
Teachers should help students gain high self-efficacy in the tasks they will need to perform. According to Tyler Rablin, we can do this by “intentionally providing students with evidence of early success to help them build the belief that they can be successful in the future” (link). Rablin suggests scaffolded assessments as one way of doing this. How might we scaffold speaking tasks? In this Think Tank issue, two of our authors write about different ways of scaffolding assignments. David Kluge demonstrates one way of scaffolding the presentation process so that students can achieve success early on in a textbook chapter by giving a short presentation. In subsequent steps, students add more information to that presentation in several stages, culminating in a longer, more involved presentation at the end of the textbook chapter. Gordon Rees shows us another way of doing this by first introducing students to collaborative radio drama learning activities and then having them give short presentations related to one of the radio drama topics. David Kluge remarks on the pride his students felt after successfully improving their presentation skills, while Gordon Rees describes his students’ increased confidence from doing the radio drama and presentation tasks.
We can also ask students to examine their public speaking goals as well as their belief in their ability to succeed in those situations. In our more podcast episode, Kathy Brooke advises her listeners to think about their end goals, visualizing the speaking situation and writing down everything they feel. She recommends trying out a red-pen/green-pen exercise. This exercise, which involves using a red pen to write down current limiting beliefs and a green pen to write down new, empowering beliefs, is a simple, yet effective technique teachers can adopt to help their students increase their self-efficacy when speaking.
Furthermore, Kathy Brooke suggests getting out of our comfort zone in small ways. For example, when at the checkout in a store, if we normally only have transactional conversations with the cashier, we might try making small talk with the cashier. Brooke also tells us to take note of people we know who step out of their comfort zones in speaking situations. She encourages us to pay attention to what they do and what their mannerisms are. This point reminds me of Harumi Kimura’s article in this issue where she writes about observing another teacher putting on different hats in the language classroom, including a language learner hat to learn English alongside primary school students.
Of course, it’s important to encourage students to push themselves out of their comfort zones when using the target language in speaking situations. We can ask students how they might imagine using the target language in class and outside of class and have them identify the speaking situations that make them feel anxious. Then, we can create classroom tasks that will nudge students towards succeeding in new speaking situations. Finally, we can give students a follow-up metacognitive opportunity, for example, by asking them to reflect on their speaking experience: what went well, what they’d like to improve, and how they intend to improve.
So, as language teachers, we have a lot of tools in our toolkit to guide students towards believing in their capability to perform well in speaking situations. But these tools aren’t just useful for our students. We can draw on them ourselves as we work towards increasing our own self-efficacy in speaking situations we find challenging and would prefer to avoid, just like the woman in our opening scenario did . . .
By the next time the woman had to present in front of colleagues in the target language, she had ventured into less familiar speaking situations in small ways. She had taken opportunities to use the foreign language in ways she didn’t usually do, for example, by extending conversations where she would normally end them. When communicating in her native language, she spoke up in situations she would normally have remained silent in. Furthermore, she had reflected on her beliefs about her ability to present in the target language, crossing out the limiting beliefs she had written in red ink replacing them with new affirmative beliefs in green ink. Now it was time for her to co-facilitate a two-day workshop with two colleagues. She felt that familiar feeling of adrenaline running through her system, but she kept those green-ink beliefs at the forefront of her mind and remembered to interpret her body’s signals not as a threat, but rather as excitement.
Heather Kretschmer has been teaching English for over 20 years, primarily in Germany. She earned degrees in German (BA & MA) and TESL (MA) from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Currently she teaches Intermediate English and Business English at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany.