Using Bibliobattle, a Book Review Game, for Developing Public Speaking Skills

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of using Bibliobattle for developing international graduate and undergraduate students' public speaking skills. Bibliobattle is a social book review game where each participant presents a review of his/her favorite book so as to persuade as many people as possible to read it, and the audience votes for 'the champ book'. The authors used this game in a Japanese language course where each learner was required to make two book-review presentations during the course. The results revealed that the need to win the audience's interest remarkably raised the learners' enthusiasm, with enhanced consideration for the understanding and feelings of the audience. The use of Bibliobattle was indicated to be an effective method to improve learners' public speaking skills.