Students’ Perceptions of Practitioner-led Teaching in a Public Speaking Course

Muhammad Isa, Jannatul Laily Noviabahari

Abstract


Effective communication skills are among the key drivers of employability, and involving industry practitioners in teaching has become a common strategy for linking classroom instruction to workplace practice. Yet practitioner-led teaching in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Public Speaking course remains underexplored, particularly in Indonesian vocational higher education. This qualitative descriptive study examined the perceptions of 11 students in a Public Speaking course within a Diploma IV (D4) program at an Indonesian state polytechnic institution, following four sessions taught entirely by an invited industry practitioner who used pedagogical translanguaging, delivering roughly 70% of instruction in English and drawing on Indonesian for the remainder. An anonymous, open-ended questionnaire was administered, and responses were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Three broader themes were identified: practice, feedback, and confidence-building as an interconnected learning loop; the value of authentic industry insight alongside the complementary roles of the practitioner and the lecturer; and students' comfort with the practitioner's flexible use of Indonesian alongside majority-English instruction. Students valued repeated practice, immediate feedback, and the practitioner's real-world experience, and several reported feeling more at ease when the practitioner drew on Indonesian than when their regular lecturer taught exclusively in English. Because instruction with the practitioner remained majority English, this comfort appears tied to the availability of strategic first-language support rather than to an absence of English altogether, suggesting that deliberate, majority-English translanguaging can lower affective barriers to participation without abandoning ESP's core aim of building English communicative competence. Because the findings reflect students' self-reported perceptions rather than observed performance, the study is best read as an exploration of perceived value rather than a demonstration of improved English competence

Keywords


authentic learning, English for Specific Purposes, public speaking, industry practitioner, vocational higher education

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21462/jeltl.v11i2.2191

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