Applying Genre-based and L2 Pragmatic Instruction to Teaching Oral Presentations on the Web

Abstract

This article describes the development of an Internet-based instructional platform, which aims to guide EFL college students in learning and practicing oral presentation skills. Genre-based instruction and insights from L2 pragmatic instructional research inspired the platform's design. The instructional units in the online platform engage learners in a comparative analysis of rhetorical and language features at both expert speaker and learner speech levels and scaffold the learners in utilizing these features to deliver practice presentations. Documenting the four EFL students' experiences using the platform, the user reports show how the guided tasks expanded the students' understanding of 'good presentations.' For learners whose language-learning goals are directed towards participating in a global community, it is suggested that key factors in developing web-based oral presentations materials are corpus selection and pedagogical tasks, which consider the learners' subjectivity in determining rhetorical and pragmatic norms.