Engineering Technical Oral Presentation: Voices of the Stakeholder

In Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, engineering students are expected to deliver technical oral presentations on numerous occasions prior to graduation. These presentations include survey report presentations, laboratory report presentations, project/assignment presentations as well as final year project presentations. Technical presentation refers to a prepared formal presentation on scientific, engineering, technological, business types, regulatory, legal, managerial or social scientific information topics to the non-expert audience (DiSanza and Legge, 2003). Students often struggled when they have to deliver technical oral presentations and most of the time they had difficulty to deliver effective presentations especially for their final year project. This study was conducted to address these issues with the intention of proposing measures to help students deliver effective technical oral presentation. This paper reports on the preliminary findings on; 1) the specific areas of difficulties faced by the students in delivering effective technical oral presentation and, 2) the different ways on improving ineffective technical oral presentation. A set of questionnaire was distributed to 235 students from six different engineering faculties in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. Findings indicated that the students encountered problems when delivering technical oral presentations especially in terms of content, delivery and language. They also provided suggestions on how to improve their technical oral presentation skills. It is hoped that the findings can shed some lights where the teaching of technical oral presentation skills to the engineering students is concerned.