The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate how student engagement in cognitive apprenticeship through the pair work activity helps build a conceptual model for performing an academic oral presentation. The participants were university students who were learning English as a foreign language (EFL) in Japan. During the pair work activity, the students practiced their presentations with three different partners, including giving advice and providing feedback. After the pair work activity, the students answered the post-activity questionnaire concerning the four elements of cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, 2006; Dennen & Burner, 2008): modeling, articulation, reflection, and exploration. The written responses were coded and analyzed thematically. The findings of the study reveal that these four aspects of cognitive apprenticeship are critically related to building a conceptual model for performing an academic oral presentation: (a) the students could observe and build a conceptual model of the thinking processes necessary for making an oral presentation, (b) they could articulate their ideas about why one oral presentation is “good” but another is “poor”, (c) the students could compare their own problem solving processes with those of other students, and (d) they could pose their own problems and try to find how to solve them. This study offers new insights on how to design and implement an activity, guiding students to perform an academic oral presentation with appropriate scaffolding in the EFL classroom.
