Online Peer Motivational Feedback in a Public Speaking Course

Providing peer feedback is commonly practiced in teaching and learning of public speaking courses. However, there is limited research examining peer motivational feedback in an online setting. This study adopted a qualitative, descriptive approach using document analysis to investigate the frequencies of peer motivational feedback which students’ use in a public speaking course within an e-learning system of a local university. In addition, the specific public speaking skills and the nature of the feedback offered by students were also examined. Twenty-three final year undergraduate students video recorded their speeches, uploaded their videos, offered and received online peer feedback in the e-learning platform. All of the recorded online peer feedback went through a thorough classification process to identify, arrange, and systemize into the specified types of feedback. The data was examined at three levels of analysis to ensure concrete conclusions were drawn. Frequencies and examples of online peer motivational feedback were also presented. The results indicated that students provide relatively more motivational feedback on delivery and voice control skills, while paying less attention to language and proficiency skills. The process of giving and receiving feedback has acted as individualized feedback in which peers helped clarify the goal, criteria and expected standards of good performance. Thus, this study suggests that online peer motivational feedback could be used as a form of practice in the teaching of online public speaking courses due to its ability to motivate and sustain students’ interest in learning public speaking while creating a student-centered learning environment.


INTRODUCTION
With the rapid development and challenging economy of today's world, public speaking skills is listed as one of the core set of skills that are essential for personal and professional growth. Previous studies have indicated that the ability to conquer public speaking skills such as speaking with confidence, projecting controlled body language and presenting good enunciation and pronunciation could impress employers and enhance job prospects for professionalism and employability (Chollet,Wörtwein, Morency, Shapiro, & Scherer, 2015;Mousawa&Elyas, 2015). This trend tends to be a form of empowerment because good public speakers project leadership abilities, poise and professionalism-qualities (Knight,Tait, & Yorke, 2006;Thu& Tú, 2013) besides presenting positive self-image of an individual (Perveen, Hasan &Aleemi, 2018).
Moreover, the methodology of public speaking courses had in fact moved beyond the normal traditional face-to-face to online public speaking courses (Henard & Roseveare, 2012;Liu and Chun-Yi, 2013). Online courses are increasing at 21% since 2009 and this trend is not going to slow down since many universities have started offering online classes (Kaya, long list of various types of feedback in the literature, there is few investigation done in the field of online peer motivational feedback especially looking at the nature of it in a public speaking course, as asserted by Mory (2004): "there is ever-increasing need to consider how new technologies change and impact feedback, its forms, and its dynamic potential for use in instructional settings". (p. 777) Thus, there is a need to address peer motivational feedback in an online public speaking course. This study explored the frequency of online peer motivational feedback used by learners in a public speaking course within an e-learning environment. Additionally, this study also looked at the specific public speaking skills (introduction, delivery and language and proficiency) and identified the nature of motivational feedback which students focused on when offering feedback on their peers' presentation. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. A review of the literature will be presented and followed by a description of the research methods and procedures used in the current study. Then, a discussion of the results is presented before the implications and directions for future research are offered towards the end of the paper.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Public speaking (also called oratory or oration) is a form of communication. Traditionally, public speaking is commonly understood as formal, face-to-face speaking of a single person to a group of listeners and feedback is offered to improve the speaker's performance. (Verderber, Verderber & Sellnow, 2011). Feedback is widely recognized as "potentially valuable aid for social, cognitive, affective and methodological benefits in teaching and learning". It is a tool to enhance performance and widely practiced in various educational settings. Feedback, in the past was provided by teacher to students but in recent times feedback can either come from the teacher, peers, oneself or experts in the field (Archer, 2010). In an extensive review of over 500 meta-analyses involving hundreds of thousands of studies and effect sizes, Hattie and Timperley (2007) found that students reported feedback to have a strong influence on their learning achievement.
However, in the past few decades, computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies have provided new online platform for public speaking courses and also to the provision of feedback. Warschauer and Ware (2006) described online peer feedback as "the means by which human feedback, particularly peer response, can be provided via technology" (p. 109). Among the identified benefits of providing online peer feedback are -(1) it could overcome time-and-place constraints, (2) reduce students' discomfiture from face-to-face critique, (3) lessen the anxiety level of giving immediate responses, followed by promoting textual exchange interactively, and (4) encourage the provision of constructive peer feedback since students have more time to provide thoughtful feedback (Liou & Peng, 2009;Pham & Usaha, 2016). Liu andSadler (2003, cited in Yeh, Tseng &Chen, 2019) also argued that students who used technology-enhanced peer feedback could generate more revision-oriented comments as well as an increased quantity of comments compared with those using traditional peer feedback.
The provision of peer feedback draws upon the Social Constructivism theory. Knowledge is constructed through interaction with others socially (McKinley, 2015). People work together to construct their own learning and this is determined by the experiences of the learner during the interaction within the group. They gradually accumulate and internalize knowledge constructed collaboratively with other participants (Kanuka & Anderson, 2007 Vygotsky's (1978) zone of proximal development (ZPD). It is the "process distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (p. 86). The ZPD frame holds the notion that more advanced students help peers who are less proficient by providing feedback, a mechanism of scaffolding by the more capable ones.
The advances in providing online peer feedback, have resulted in many scholars investigating and classifying feedback into various types (Eikenberry, 2011;Gielenet al., 2010;Kulhavy & Wager, 1993;Lundstrom & Baker, 2009;Nelson, 2008;Notar, Wilson & Ross, 2002;Pyke & Sherlock, 2010). Table 1 Table 1 shows the various types of feedback classified by several researchers. However, the various types of feedback listed in the literature must be utilized depending on the intended goal since some are more effective than others for learning (Norcini, 2010). Although there are many classification of feedback in the literature as displayed in table 1, the types of feedback explored by Pyke and Sherlock (2010) were adopted because the present study is more concerned with the feedback provided by peers in an online setting. Students take the role of a teacher to analyze, offer, receive and share comments, opinions and suggestions within the e-learning system of the university. Furthermore, the classification by Pyke and Sherlock (2010) provides a clear distinction of the types of feedback offered to students (corrective, motivational and technological). In addition, Pyke and Sherlock's (2010) categorization was also adopted by other studies investigating feedback categorization (Alharbi, 2013;Lenards, 2017;Rigas & Alharbi, 2011); hence it will be very useful to employ their categorization of feedback to best match the objectives of this study.
Corrective feedback refers to the information given by an evaluator about the learners' performance and aims to increase learning through error correction, which is specifically for task performance (Mory, 2004). However, this type of feedback rarely occurs as students often hesitate to give corrective feedback to their peers. They are not ready to give feedback to correct their peers' proficiency level especially if the speaker's proficiency is better that the feedback giver's language proficiency (Sato, 2007). Similar notion was shared by Philp, Walter, and Basturkmen (2010) who highlighted the hesitation of students is due to their proficiency (e.g., readiness to correct as a learner), task-related discourses (e.g., interruption during arole-play), and social relationship (e.g., face-saving).
Besides corrective feedback, another largely offered feedback type is the motivational feedback. This type of feedback identified in the literature is catered to provide motivation to the learner to perform a task. If corrective feedback focuses on the task content, motivational feedback on the other hand focuses on the student or the speaker to perform a task. It is offered to reorient the learner to the goal of learning without emphasizing the performance of the learner. It does not give guidance on how to improve learning but rather makes the learner feel good on the task performed. The individual differences found in learners affect their motivation, and these differences affect feedback needs (Smith & Ragan, 1993). Motivational feedback aims to motivate or encourage a learner to perform a task. It is to help the learner continue his effort despite the challenges and setbacks (Sales, 1993) and help them gain "a sense of control over the learning" (Hoska, 1993). The feelings of confidence will eventually motivate the learner to engage in the learning process and this is the focus of the current study.
Motivation impacts the ways in which students perform the learning tasks (Hoska, 1993), and according to Smith and Ragan (1993), lack of motivation can lead to an increase in learner errors (Smith & Ragan, 1993). Students felt honoured and appreciated when asked to evaluate their peers' presentation (Ho, 2003) because feedback helps them to reorient themselves to meet their learning goal and this promotes higher engagement from students in the tasks given (Cummins, 2000), which eventually contributed to the students' motivation towards improvement. However, Pyke and Sherlock (2010) highlighted that feedback must also be goal-oriented in order that learners will build intrinsic motivation within themselves to engage positively in the learning process (Butler & Winne, 1995in Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006) despite challenges and setbacks. By aiding learners to take charge of success and failure as a function of their own personal effort (Hoska, 1993), motivational feedback gives learners a sense of personal relevance and ownership of the instruction.

METHOD PARTICIPANTS
A detailed description of the methodology including the content of the online public speaking course, the reasons for choosing the participants and the duration of the study are explained in detail.
The present study was conducted in one of the universities in the southern region of Malaysia. The participants were 23 students, respectively 6 males and 17 females; all aged 23 years old, from an intact class. The reason for selecting an intact class is because students in the university under investigation were already in naturally assembled classes. Besides, in a qualitative approach small sample sizes are allowed and acceptable (Paluck, 2010). Participants of this study were selected based on those who met the following criteria: GEMA Online ® Journal of Language Studies Volume 19(4), November 2019 http: //doi.org/10.17576/gema-2019-1904-14 eISSN: 2550-2131 ISSN: 1675-8021 263 a) registered for Effective Oral Communication Skills programme, an elective programme in the university, with Public Speaking as one of the core components; b) attended the first two proficiency papers, namely English for Academic Purposes and Advanced English for Academic Purposes in their first and second year of study; c) easily available; lived within the university vicinity or at least an hour's drive of the college campus.
The researcher randomly chose a cluster of students (n=23) for both depth and breadth of information to answer the research questions formulated in the study. Besides, choosing a random cluster sampling method is also convenient (Lohr, 2009) as the population is already divided into clusters or naturally assembled groups, called 'Sections', on university ground from the general student population, and was bound on academic schedules and the university's existing infrastructure.
Apart from the participants, two raters were recruited to carry out the analysis procedure of the online peer feedback record, and interview data independently with the main researcher. The two raters also cross-checked the concepts, themes and codes extracted from the data. The raters helped to check the consistency of the findings from data analysis. The Head of the programme for Effective Oral Communication and another lecturer who was teaching a similar subject were selected as the raters. Both of them have vast content knowledge and experience in teaching public speaking skills since they have been teaching for more than five years and more importantly, were willing to participate in this study. Kohlbacher (2006) emphasize that data conducted by several researchers improve the quality and the reliability of the findings. In this process, each of the analysist's view was checked with one another, to strengthen the final findings. Consequently, the chances of rigidity and biasness in findings were reduced to a great extent.
The student participants engaged in the course activities within the e-learning system. The e-learning system is equipped with nine input videos of public speaking skills among which are eliminating fear of public speaking, developing strong introduction, developing effective conclusion, presenting a persuasive speech and using verbal and non-verbal elements in public speaking. All input videos are aimed at enhancing students' understanding of a particular topic. Students were free to decide what they would like to learn. As they viewed the videos, helpful tips will be highlighted on the left side of the video for students' better understanding of the skills. Students could also download the video transcripts as downloadable notes. This new method of providing input will create new learning environment for students since it engages students with sounds, colours and flash animation rather than the traditional teacher's 'chalk and talk' method. All videos and downloadable notes were designed and developed based on the notes from "The Art of Public Speaking" by Lucas (2011). Student uploaded their own speech once they were ready to present. Other students provided feedback to the uploaded peers' video presentation. They were given options to offer any form of feedback related to the video presentations.
Basically. the operational framework of the study involved students undertaking these general stages, i) searching relevant information within the OPSC website, ii) presenting a speech, iii) recording and uploading own public speaking videos to the OPSC website, iv) offering and receiving online peer feedback v) revising or repeating a speech based on online peer feedback.

RESEARCH PROCEDURES
The e-learning system in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) (Figure 1) has been developed since the 1980s to provide a new learning atmosphere for students (Koharuddin et al., 2003) in which a faster, collaborative and interactive engagement between student-teacher and student-student are fostered. The UTM e-learning allows a virtual place for uploading materials, slides, assignments, and is an interactive environment for sharing knowledge and discussions. Studies have been conducted to assess the acceptance of e-learning among lecturers and students of UTM (Masrom, 2007;Razak, 2010), the effectiveness of e-learning in the process of teaching and learning (Norliza, 2010;Rizka, 2009;Yahya, 2009) and the satisfactory level of students using the e-learning system (Al-rahmi, Othman & Yusof, 2015;Razak, 2010). Essentially, the system allows students to upload assignments in any format compatible to the system such as video files, pdf files and text files. It also provides a synchronous and asynchronous communication platform for students to interact between teacher-student or student-student. Essentially, the system allows the usage of peer feedback to learn public speaking skills. Figure 1 below shows the main interface of UTM e-learning system. All the online peer feedbacks were automatically recorded into the e-learning system and later downloaded for analysis. The online peer feedback records covered all the students' interactions within the e-learning system. The data was coded and analysed using three levels of analysis based on public speaking skills and the results are discussed in the next section.

DATA ANALYSIS
The online peer feedback records collected in the present study encompassed all the interactions of the students within the e-learning system. Students provided online peer feedback to their peers' public speaking video presentations. All students' online peer feedback in e-learning was recorded automatically into the system and later was downloaded for analysis at the end of four weeks of the study period.
To understand the types and frequency of online peer feedback, all the online peer feedback were collected, downloaded and analysed thematically. There was a total of 463 online peer feedback exchanges documented from 23 students for a duration of four weeks and these exchanges were taken from a total of 75 video extracts. All online peer feedback were downloaded to identify and categorized according to the different types of peer feedback based on the Pyke and Sherlock's (2010) Feedback Classification Flowchart as shown in Figure 2 A preliminary statistical analysis 'inter-coder agreement' was carried out prior to categorizing the gathered peer feedback. Two raters of the study co-operatively analysed and categorised the online peer feedback types together with the researcher. They spent around 30 minutes familiarising themselves with the categorising framework of Pyke and Sherlock (2010) and had a trial categorising session with 30 of the 463 online peer feedback. The consistency in categorising the data ensures reliability of the analysis and there was 96.4% agreement which is higher than 83% as obtained by Paulus (2009) and higher than 95% found by Pyke and Sherlock (2010). Following that, the raters and researcher spent approximately three hours for two days categorising the entire online peer feedback independently. The researcher compiled the results and made some critical comparisons. The online peer feedback was coded and analysed using three levels of data analysis as presented in Table 2 based on the public speaking skills. As shown in Table 2, data collected from the online peer feedback was analysed using three levels of analysis. In the first level of analysis, the raw data was recorded as separate units, which expressed as one particular idea (Krippendorff, 2004). This means each feedback is separated into smaller meaningful units and later analyzed to identify the types of online peer feedback. This level identifies whether the feedback is corrective, motivational or graphical using the Feedback Classification Flowchart by Pyke and Sherlock (2010). Then, the feedback was classified further into two other levels of analysis, the public speaking skills and its sub-skills as shown in Table 2 above. In the case of unidentified type of feedback, a new category was recorded. A sample of the classification procedure is shown below in Table  3. Once all the peer feedback were classified into the three levels, the next step was to record the frequency of occurrences and examples of the types of online peer feedback to be used for writing the findings of the current study. The next section presents the findings of the study.

FINDINGS/DISCUSSION
In this section, all the findings from the analysis are presented. For the purpose of this research paper, only online peer motivational type feedback will be reported as it is one small part of a larger scale study. It was noted after classifying all the online peer feedback that there were 208 online peers motivational type feedback recorded, from a total of 463 collected online peer feedback. This is 45% of the total collected online peer feedback in the e-learning setting. Table 4 displays the distribution of the online peer motivational feedback with regard to the main skills of public speaking. It is noted from Table 4 that students preferred the delivery and voice control skills when assisting each other in improving their public speaking skills, which covered 78.4 percent (n=163). The least used skills that rarely received feedback were the language and proficiency skills with only 5 feedback (2.4%). Organization skills amounted to 40 feedback (19.2%) of the overall recorded online peer motivational feedback.
To understand what encompasses online peer motivational feedback, this study looked into the second and third level analysis of the identified online peer motivational feedback. Table 5 displays some samples of online peer motivational feedback identified for the organization skills of public speaking. Contents of the main public speaking skills S12 "…your topic is good and interesting…" Organization Topic S3 "…the topic to 'Reading Habit in adults' is interesting" Topic S15 "…your introduction is interesting because you use question, quotes before going in to your story.." Introduction of speech S8 "…hey S8, your introduction did captured attention of others, the topic is simple but interesting…" Introduction of speech S22 "..you elaborated your main idea in good way.." Main ideas S4 "…main ideas were clear and easy to understand…" Main ideas S3 "the content of your speech is good" Body of speech S14 "You have got a lot of points in your story…" Body of speech -Transitions S4 "your conclusion make me laugh because interesting"

Conclusions
Referring to Table 5, it can be observed that students use words like "good", "interesting", "clear and easy" when offering online peer motivational feedback which indicated a positive atmosphere or boosted confidence for the speaker. S8, for example received feedback which reads as "…your introduction did captured attention of others, the topic is simple but interesting, …". In this example, phrases like 'did captured attention' and 'simple but interesting' inform the speaker managed to attract the audience's attention and was able to present well with simple yet interesting and creative topic. Similarly, in another example, S12 received praises regarding topic selection. The words like "good" and "interesting" builds the speaker's confidence to participate in future presentation sessions. This creates the students' capacity to self-regulate their own performances (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006) when they receive positive feedback. Table 6 displays the frequency of the online peer motivational feedback related to the organization skills and its contents.  Table 6 highlights 40 online peer motivational feedback for the organization skills shared by the 23 students' interactions within the e-learning setting. The highest number of feedback is in providing motivation when choosing appropriate topic of speech (n=14) followed by introduction of speech (n=13) and finally body of speech (n=12). These were the three main content areas that students focused on to motivate each other's public speaking performance. However, use of transitional markers and conclusion of speech were not found in the study, which is similar with the findings of online peer corrective feedback. Table 7 displays some examples of the online peer motivational feedback in the second and third level of analysis of delivery and voice control skills. "…I like the energy you have when you speak." Enthusiasm S9 "…have a good body posture.." Posture S7 "great you are getting better with the body gestures… Gesture S4 "…nice facial expression…" Facial Expressions S12 "…you make a good eye-contact with the Eye-contact "…you have a good volume of speech that make us hear you clearly Volume S1 "…I like to listen to you. You speak calm and not speeding. I can understand…"

Rate of speech
The use of online peer motivational feedback in the e-learning website was noted to provide positive feelings to the speaker. Words like "good", "great", "nice" are some examples of vocabulary that the students used to motivate each other's' public speaking performance. In addition, phrases like "I like the energy" as received by S4 and "I like to listen to you" received by S1 reflect the speaker's ability to attract the audience attention. These comments are encouraging and the peer feedback sounds emphatic. These types of feedback will encourage the students to do more presentation which will eventually improve their performance in public speaking skills.
Next, Table 8 illustrates the breakdown of the findings for the frequency of the online peer motivational feedback related to the delivery and voice control skills and its subskills.  Table 8 presents the online peer motivational feedback of the 23 students within the elearning environment. There are 163 motivational feedback classified under the delivery and voice control skills. The trend shows that students preferred skills such as gestures (n=59) and facial expressions (n=47) when motivating their peers to improve public speaking performance. Data also shows that none of the students provided feedback for skills like vitality and rapport with audience. A possible explanation for this might be that the students provide feedback to the skills that are observable. Next, it is important to observe language and proficiency skills of public speaking and all subskills. Table 9 displays some examples of online peer motivational feedback identified for language and proficiency skills of public speaking. "…simple vocabulary and easy to understand…" Vocabulary S8 "…I notice that you use good words when you present…" Vocabulary S7 "…you have good language and grammar…: Grammar S21 "…perfect grammar bro…" S21 "…nice pronunciation…." Pronunciation S13 "…you have American slang when you speak…"

Pronunciation
It was noticed that students motivated their peers with positive words and phrases such as "nice", "simple and easy", good" to make the speaker feel good. Besides, simple positive acknowledgement like "…I think I understand what you want to say.." could enhance the confidence level of the speaker. The word "perfect" signals to the speaker that he is good in his presentation and this will boost his confidence level. This supports when Lucas (2011) highlighted that motivational feedback reduces anxiety or phobia of public speaking.
Next, the frequency of online peer motivational feedback for language and proficiency skills is presented in Table 10. In this research, it was noted that students received five online peer motivational feedback for language and proficiency skills. There are two types of feedback recorded for pronunciation skills, one each for communication of message, voice control and grammar and another for fluency of speech. Previous results for corrective feedback also indicated less feedback for language and proficiency skills, similar to motivational feedback. This phenomenon could be due to the lack of confidence or insufficient language knowledge on the part of the students. Since these are engineering students, they might lack the knowledge related to language specifically; thus were reluctant to comment on language and proficiency skills. Furthermore, inaccurate or wrong feedback on language and proficiency skills could impact their friendship if wrong language errors are corrected. However, it was noted that they were able to correct errors related to pronunciation. This supports McGarrell's (2010) findings in a study where he noted that students lack confidence when they have to provide useful feedback related to language. This could be due to the challenges of providing feedback without impacting their relationship with peers, and the difficulty of knowing what to comment on and how to phrase commentary without risking their friendship.
As a summary of the findings, it was gathered that most of the online peer motivational feedback (n= 163) were offered for delivery and voice control skills which is 78.3% of the total motivational feedback followed by organization of speech (40 feedbacks or 19.2%) and the least was for language and proficiency' with only 5 feedback (2.5%). Thus, it can be concluded that students offered more motivational feedback for delivery and voice control skills and they seem more confident to provide feedback in this area of public speaking skills since it is observable during the presentation of speech.

CONCLUSION
In this paper, the types of online peer feedback students provide to improve public speaking performance within the e-learning system of a local university was investigated. Firstly, all the online peer feedback downloaded from the e-learning system were classified into three levels of analysis, in which the first level identifies the type of feedback (corrective, motivational, technological). This was conducted based on a classification framework adapted from Pyke and Sherlock's (2010) Feedback Classification Flowchart (refer Figure 2). Then, all the motivational type feedback was classified further into the public speaking main skills and subskills (refer Table 1). This paper only reports on the online peer motivational feedback and not the other two types of feedback since this is only a small part of a larger scale study.
The present study established the pedagogical effectiveness of online peer motivational feedback in improving students' public speaking performance. The findings indicated that feedback indeed is a great tool to sustain quality of students' learning to a higher level and this was done through the provision of motivational type feedback. The findings confirms claims in the literature that online peer feedback is an appropriate methodology to enhance students' public speaking performance (Archer, 2010;Linardopoulus, 2010;Pyke & Sherlock, 2010).
This study also embarked on investigating the frequency of motivational feedback offered and received by students. Students were found to complement good gestures of performance to help their peers continue doing presentation practices in the process of acquiring and improving public speaking skills. This builds students' confidence levels in improving some daunting areas of learning. Thus, this study confirms the claim that although students are in a virtual environment, motivating peers is still important as highlighted by Duijnhouwer, Prins and Stokking (2012). It is proven that the effect of motivational feedback is salient in an online course as students might lose interest if they get frustrated over a performance. In other words, motivational peer feedback is crucial in a modern web-based learning environment to reduce the withdrawal syndrome in online learning situations. In addition, it was also noted that students gave a lot of motivational feedback for delivery and voice-control skills especially skills like gestures and facial expressions when motivating their peers and a possible explanation might be that the students provide feedback to the skills that are observable. This conclusion is further clarified when none of the students provided feedback for skills like vitality and rapport with audience. This is similar to a study conducted by Colthorpe, Chen and Zimbardi (2014) who found that students offer more feedback on style and fewer on other parts of speech.
The present study highlighted the development of small learning community. When students receive and offer feedback, they interact within their small community. This encourages independent learning, discussion among students, reflection of their own work and decision making to develop strategies to improve learning. Learning through this small community gradually modify their original performance to an improved quality performance while enhancing the students' self-confidence. Thus, the distribution of knowledge when they work collaboratively in a small virtual community increases the quality of learning and this is in-line with the expectation of constructivist learning.
In conclusion, the utilization of online peer feedback in public speaking course can benefit students, language instructors and teachers by making it more student-centered learning which contributes to life-long learning. This is parallel to the Constructivist view (Vygotsky, 1978), in which the online peer feedback instruction train students to be responsible and independent in seeking new knowledge. Course designers should not only put emphasis on using peer feedback in learning, but also to focus on motivational feedback since it can reduce anxiety or phobia of public speaking. Students can help each other reduce weaknesses in speech presentation. Some students are naturally independent, but some have to be trained to become independent learners. The use of the online motivational peer feedback train students to become independent learners in the process of knowledge acquisition. Thus, online peer motivational feedback could be used as a form of practice in the teaching of public speaking courses, especially in an online setting due to its capacity to motivate and sustain students' interest in learning public speaking while creating a studentcentered learning environment.