Using virtual reality to train public speaking skills in a secondary school setting
Training adolescent students to speak in public is crucial for the development of their oral competence but also beneficial for their social abilities, as it empowers them to engage in learning opportunities among their peers and has consequences for their future educational outcomes. To achieve the...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2023 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/688348 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/688348 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Public speaking Virtual reality Parlar en públic Hablar en público Realidad virtual Realitat virtual 62 |
| Sumario: | Training adolescent students to speak in public is crucial for the development of their oral competence but also beneficial for their social abilities, as it empowers them to engage in learning opportunities among their peers and has consequences for their future educational outcomes. To achieve the goal of boosting the students’ public speaking abilities, secondary schools need to acknowledge the importance that oral skills have in formal education, taking steps to not only create opportunities for students to develop their oracy more often but also offer them proper training while encouraging them to actively take part in their community. However, due to the constraints on classroom time inherent in the course curriculum, most teachers might find it difficult to introduce opportunities for public speaking practice in the classroom. Virtual reality (VR) technology can be used in schools as an educational tool for rehearsing oral presentations as it generates for the user the illusion that they are standing in front of a live audience. Though there is some evidence that VR might be useful for reducing public speaking anxiety in clinical and educational settings, less is known about how VR can be employed to enhance the oral skills of young high school students. The main goal of this thesis is to explore the benefits of having such students use VR to practice public speaking by assessing its effects not only on the students’ levels of public speaking anxiety but also on their public speaking skills. To this end, the following measures will be taken before, during and after students practice public speaking to a VR-simulated audience: self-perceived public speaking anxiety, speaker charisma, the persuasiveness of the message, a full set of prosodic features and gesture rate. Furthermore, the potential beneficial effects of encouraging the full use of the body while employing VR on both public speaking anxiety and public speaking skills will be investigated. The present PhD thesis consists of three independent studies that use a between-subjects experimental design plus two introductory and conclusions sections that tie the three studies together. A cohort of 92 17-year-old high school students participated in the three studies. The first study shows that rehearsing public speaking to a VR-simulated audience caused the participants to increase their vocal effort and loudness. The second study shows that regardless of whether they practiced their public speaking in front of a VR-generated audience or alone, participants showed diminished public speaking anxiety after training; however, the speeches of participants who had practiced before a VR audience exhibited a more audience-oriented prosody. Finally, the third study shows that participants who were encouraged to fully use their bodies while practicing to a VR audience produced speeches post-practice that were significantly more persuasive and charismatic than participants who did not receive such encouragement. Together, the findings reported in this thesis suggest that the use of VR could be promoted in high schools as a complementary tool to help engage students in rehearsing oral skills. These results also suggest that boosting oral expressiveness through embodiment during VR-assisted public speaking practice can make student speeches more persuasive and charismatic when they subsequently speak before a live audience. Finally, our studies all point to the great potential of VR technology as an educational tool because of its game-like appeal to adolescents. All in all, the novel multidimensional analysis of oral speeches by students undertaken here provides convincing evidence that the application of this tool to the academic context is of considerable utility for rehearsing and developing oral communication skills. |
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