Pecha Kucha Presentations: Digital Adaptation and Online Communication in ESP Higher Education

Abstract

This comparative research analyses some reflections regarding the teaching and learning approaches designed to foster communicative English language skills under the modality of online education with real-time interaction and multimodal communicative mediation. Because of the global pandemic COVID-19, the higher educational community of three different subjects on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) modified their programs to full online education with different digital tools and interactive methods. A survey was used to analyze students' preferences regarding this abrupt change. Consequently, the delivery of communicative skills through mediated multimodal communication or interaction in English were explored with students' online speaking presentations, which followed the Pecha Kucha model. It is suggested that the multimodal Pecha Kucha speeches allowed participants to produce, receive, interact, and mediate their interpersonal communication with interactive comments, expressed synchronously via MS Teams or posted asynchronously on the forum via written or audio messages.