Peer evaluation of oral presentations in Croatia

Abstract

This paper aims to explore student engagement in peer evaluation activities related to giving scientific presentations in English (L2) and to investigate student attitudes towards this form of evaluation in the course Communication skills in Croatian (L1). The participants in this study were first-year students of engineering in Split, Croatia. Peer review grades have shown that the verbal part of delivering oral presentations in English is the most demanding and challenging part in presentations. The results on student attitudes have shown that the students hold positive attitudes towards peer evaluation. Moreover, they claim to have become aware that speech disfluencies (filled and silent pauses, repetitions, false starts, grammatical errors) negatively affect the overall oral performance, pointing out that efforts should be made in order to reduce them, therefore, the course Communication skills is by the vast majority of students regarded as a valuable course in times of increasingly complex communication requirements.