Investigating the Attitudes of Third-Year English-Majored Students towards Using Non-Verbal Communication to the Audience Engagement in A Presentation at Sai Gon University

Giving a presentation can be considered to be pivotal in modern education with an ultimate aim is to help students be active in absorbing information and then learn to deliver the knowledge they gained by themselves to other counterparts. Admittedly, verbal communication is indispensable for learners to deliver a speech, but to optimize the effectiveness of the presentation, they need to master the art of non-verbal communication as well. Indeed, there has been an abundance of research attempting to shed light on the impact of non-verbal cues on the success of a public speech so far. However, the question of how the use of non-verbal communication influences the audience engagement during presentations in an EFL context remains underexplored. This study aims to investigate the attitudes of EFL undergraduates towards applying non-verbal communication in presentations to keep the audience engaged. A descriptive quantitative design was employed which involved 100 third-year EFL students selected by using the convenience sampling technique. Subsequently, a questionnaire was administered to collect data on the attitudes of the students, and descriptive quantitative analysis was then conducted to gain valuable insights. The results indicate that the students tend to adopt a favourable attitude towards incorporating non-verbal communication into presentations to engage the audience. In detail, the three out of five most common non-verbal cues, namely facial expressions, eye contact and gestures, seem to be considered as predominantly favored and frequently used by the junior presenters compared to other types. Although the remaining cues including postures and movements are not quite popular among the students, their crucial roles in reinforcing the effectiveness of the speech should not be underestimated. In the end, these findings suggest that the students should pay more attention to their non-verbal signals during presentations to captivate their audiences.

English-majored students, non-verbal communication, engaging the audience, presentation

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