Abstract
There has been a longstanding concern that Japanese schools have not focused on oral communication (OC) in the English curriculum. As a result, mandatory OC courses have recently become popular at universities. OC course design is an important issue for university students and educators. For this reason, this paper uses action research to discuss the use of English by Japanese university students in the six classes of OC. Use of English is influenced by discipline, grade, and task assessment. When students lacked English proficiency, they tried to use a variety of compensation strategies to help them use English. From this point of view, this paper discusses suggestions for the future development of OC courses.