Developing Productive Skills through an Interactive Approach: Present to Learn

This paper aims at presenting an interactive approach that was implemented on Arab Open University (AOU) students to enrich their productive skills namely speaking, oral presentation and writing skills. The researcher aimed at establishing a community of practice through a blended learning environment which considers non-traditional multicultural leaner. This community of practice presents a combination of face-to-face facilitated learning, e-learning and self-study. The researcher applied “Present to Learn” approach on AOU students employing Johari Windows Model to develop the identified productive skills and break the students’ stage fright through collaboration in groups. An observation checklist was developed to check the students’ oral presentation and writing prompts. In addition, a questionnaire was developed to measure the students’ satisfaction towards the applied interactive approach and their assessment of the whole experiment. It was observed that cooperative work especially with having critical partners has improved the students’ performance achievement through learning from each other in one group and competing with other groups. The collected feedback from the questionnaire was in favour of applying this approach on more groups which was implemented across three consecutive academic semesters. Moreover, the students’ end results were statistically analysed and a correlation between high performance achievement and active participation inside and outside the class was drawn. The results have shown that students who participated by giving presentations reflecting their group work obtained higher grades than those who failed to work with others or did not give any presentations.

This paper aims at presenting an interactive approach that was implemented on Arab Open University (AOU) students to enrich their productive skills namely speaking, oral presentation and writing skills. The researcher aimed at establishing a community of practice through a blended learning environment which considers non-traditional multicultural leaner. This community of practice presents a combination of face-to-face facilitated learning, e-learning and self-study. The researcher applied “Present to Learn” approach on AOU students employing Johari Windows Model to develop the identified productive skills and break the students’ stage fright through collaboration in groups. An observation checklist was developed to check the students’ oral presentation and writing prompts. In addition, a questionnaire was developed to measure the students’ satisfaction towards the applied interactive approach and their assessment of the whole experiment. It was observed that cooperative work especially with having critical partners has improved the students’ performance achievement through learning from each other in one group and competing with other groups. The collected feedback from the questionnaire was in favour of applying this approach on more groups which was implemented across three consecutive academic semesters. Moreover, the students’ end results were statistically analysed and a correlation between high performance achievement and active participation inside and outside the class was drawn. The results have shown that students who participated by giving presentations reflecting their group work obtained higher grades than those who failed to work with others or did not give any presentations.