| dc.description.abstract | Access to digital technologies changes how presentations are practiced in English
as a second language, including oral exams. Consequently, the research in the present
thesis addresses the following topic: "Digital technologies as mediator of oral
presentations in second language learning: A qualitative study of developing oral and
performative skills". I investigate how digital technologies mediate students' oral
presentations in English. The study emphasizes how social, cultural and material
artefacts afford and constrain students in developing and demonstrating their oral
language skills. The main focus of this study is on the students' practices and their
reflections on such practices. The study was conducted with help from eleven 10th
graders and their teachers during December 2009.
From a socio-cultural perspective on learning, this study examines how technologies
and language mediate students' oral presentations in English. Hence, the concepts of
mediation and multimodality are central to this study. The methods used are qualitative.
They consist of video recordings of students' presentations in English, and thematic
discussions based on the presentations and group interviews. In the analysis we find that
students use an approach similar to show and tell, while the technologies and modalities
facilitate the oral presentation. The performative aspects of the presentations are
prominent. Technologies help students find, consolidate, summarize, and present
relevant information. When speaking, they are limited by the use of scripts and slides
with too much structured information. If, however, the slides contain text types such as
photos, maps and graphs, we see that multimodality mediates an oral presentation that
would have been difficult to achieve without digital technologies. | no_NO |
