Supplementary Online Study Platform for an Oral Communication Skills Course: Implementation, Evaluation and Suggestions

The purpose of this study is to explore how first-year candidate teachers of English make use of an online support to their EFL oral communication courses. The online support consists of asynchronous speaking and listening activities designed to be completed outside the classroom as a supplementary material. The findings of the study suggest that online support has potentials as a supplementary independent study tool to support oral communication courses. The participants preferred speaking activities to listening activities. Participants could do most Speak Only activities, namely individual discussion, prompted speech and situational talk without any preparation, except for vocabulary related activities and integrated speaking activities, which required preparation. Integrated speaking-listening activities demanded prior mental or physical preparation. The frequency and extent of preparation varied across participants, yet the participants employed a variety of preparation strategies, including brainstorming, verbatim script writing, contextualization, and keywords as prompts. Listen and respond could easily be completed by noting new words and listening to the recording a couple of times, whereas integrated listening-speaking activities required intensive listening and note taking. The participants used the activities in the online support mainly to expand the learning that takes place in the classroom and to revise the relevant content. Previewing was another reason to use the activities; however, it was not as common as the other two purposes.