Speech Education: Providing Self-presentation Skills and Self-confidence

Needless to say that successful people tend to rank high in their self-esteem, because they have had positive comments from others for their successes. Reflecting this example often found in daily bases, the author would like to find that if receiving a decent amount of positive comments and attitudes from others to their self-presentations affects trainees’ level of self-esteem. In this study, the author examines the correlations in the level of trainees’ self-esteem and the ability to modify self-presentation after their giving 3 presentations in English or taking 24 hours of conversational English classes using two kinds of psychometric tests. The result showed that in the life-long education setting, there is a strong correlation between the 2 abilities if the trainees are starters. In addition, doing easy tasks and not knowing stagnation periods that they might have in their later learning, the changes they showed in the both scales are great. Conversely, the students with some backgrounds in studying English ranked their self-esteem high in the first place, but lower in the last place still with a higher score in their self-presentation skills. In the university classes, the students with the lower TOEIC scores scored their self-esteem low in the first place and only a little improvement later, but they see some improvements in their ability to present themselves in just 3 months, so even though there was almost no correlations in the 2 scales in April, there showed a weak correlation in July. On the other hand, the students with the higher TOEIC score already had high scores in both the scales in the beginning and improved them again in July, especially greater in the self-presentation scale, so there were already a little correlation in the two scales in April, but it became greater in July. Based on the findings, the author concluded that correlations in the two abilities depend on trainees’ language proficiency and the settings they are in. It is not a clear conclusion, but this study at least gives some insights to both the educators and learners in various situations respectively