Abstract

The study explored the impact of gender on the use of oral communication strategies (OCS) among 60 first-year university English as a Second Language (ESL) students in Fiji. The OCSI (Oral Communication Strategy Inventory) was administered following an in-class oral presentation. Semi-structured interviews were then conducted with a subgroup of the participants (n = 10) to discuss why they had selected the strategies. Findings suggest that fluency, accuracy, and non-verbal strategies were the most used by students to meet academic expectations. Significant gender differences were found in four categories: female students used social-affective strategies and negotiation for meaning more frequently than male students, and male students dropped messages more frequently than did females. These differences appeared to be related to two types of anxiety-management orientations indicated by the qualitative data in the study: female students managed a sense of distress through message clarity and the speaker-audience relationship, whereas males saw face-saving as exiting the message as a strategy against public errors. These results may have a bearing on ESL instruction in the South Pacific, as they suggest that oral communication programmes need to factor in gender. For example, teachers can prompt male students to develop more robust negotiation strategies rather than withdrawing, and all students can transition from translator-based processing to a direct thinking process in the target language.

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