Oracy skills in a digital environment: what do foreign language undergraduate students need?

Abstract

Foreign language learning is highly interactive and requires opportunities for academic speaking. The focus of this paper is how foreign language undergraduate students experienced this process in an online learning context. Through semi-structured interviews with seven undergraduate French, German and Spanish students, participants highlighted the challenges of speaking in a foreign language in an online environment and articulated the need for speaking skills which could compensate for the lack of visual clues. Drawing on the Oracy Skills Framework, this study suggests that certain skills were particularly pertinent and others could be added to fully reflect the reality of engaging in oral communication in an online environment. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we propose an adapted Oracy Skills Framework for a foreign language learning context which is timely and relevant for both online and face-to-face contexts. Second, we suggest ways in which teachers and students in higher education can support foreign language learners in speaking in online spaces.