Effects of Voki-Supported Individual Presentation on EFL High School Students’ Speaking Performance

Speaking is a challenging process to master since it requires lots of practice and exposure for a language learner to become proficient. Limited opportunities, affective factors, and the English sound system, on the other hand, are unavoidable issues EFL teachers encounter while getting students to speak English in ELF classrooms. Realistically, technology has been integrated into such a non-authentic communication context for language skills improvement. Web 2.0 applications with multimedia affordances to EFL students' language proficiency may be useful solutions in twenty-first-century language classrooms. The Voki app may offer an innovative alternative for exposing students to a non-threatening environment for English practice. Furthermore, it is likely to optimize opportunities for EFL learners to self-practice speaking the target language. Derived from these possibilities, this paper aimed to examine the effects of students’ self-practice using Voki on their speaking performance. The proposal employed a quasi-experimental control group design in which the effects were measured using two speaking tests before and after the treatment and further explored with a semi-structured interview. The results showed the students increased their speaking skills and expressed satisfaction with this tool because of its effectiveness and engagement. Their shyness and nervousness about uttering the target language diminished as their confidence grew. The study offered more evidence of the efficacy of Voki on EFL students’ speaking performance. Future research can lengthen the experiment time and investigate learners’ improvement in language proficiency in different skills and contexts, using larger sample sizes.