Giving an Oral Presentaion

Use your voice to communicate clearly

• Speak loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear you.
  This may feel uncomfortably loud at first, but if people can't hear you, they won't listen.
• Speak slowly and clearly.
• Don’t rush! Speaking fast doesn’t make you seem smarter, it will only make it harder for other people to understand you.
• Key words are important. Speak them out slowly and loudly.
• Vary your voice quality. If you always use the same volume and pitch (for example, all loud, or all soft, or in a monotone) your audience will switch off.
• When you begin a new point, use a higher pitch and volume.
• Slow down for key points.
• Use pauses—don't be afraid of short periods of silence. (They give you a chance to gather your thoughts, and your audience a chance to think.)

Use your body to communicate, too!

• Stand straight and comfortably. Do not slouch or shuffle about.
• Hold your head up. Look around and make eye-contact with people in the audience. Do not just address the lecturer! Do not stare at a point on the carpet or the wall. If you don't include the audience, they won't listen to you.
• When you are talking to your friends, you naturally use your hands, your facial expression, and your body to add to your communication. Do it in your presentation as well. It will make things far more interesting for the audience.
• Don't turn your back on the audience!

Interact with the audience

• Be aware of how your audience is reacting. Are they interested or bored? If they look confused, ask them why. Stop if necessary and explain a point again.
• Check if the audience is still with you. ‘Does that make sense?’
  ‘Is that clear?’
• Be open to questions. If someone raises a hand, or asks a question in the middle of your talk, answer it. If you can't answer it, turn the question back out to the audience and let someone else answer it!
• Questions are good. They show that the audience is listening with interest. They should not be regarded as an attack on you, but as a collaborative search for deeper understanding.
• Be ready to get the discussion going after your presentation. Just in case nobody has anything to say, have some provocative questions or points for discussion ready to ask the group.

III Developing background knowledge (B1/B2/C1)

B PRACTISING SKILLS

TEXT 1 (B2)

Put the word(s) in brackets in the right form.

Death by PowerPoint

By Richard M. Felder, Rebecca Brent

It’s a rare professor who 1._____________ (NOT, TEMPT) in recent years to put his or her lecture notes on transparencies or PowerPoint. It takes some effort to create the slides, but once they 2._____________ (DO), teaching is easy. The course material is nicely organized, attractively formatted, and easy to present, and revising and updating the notes each year is 3._____________ (TRIVIA). You can put handouts of the slides on the Web so the students have convenient access to them, and if the students bring copies to class and so 4._____________ (NOT, HAVE TO) take notes, you can cover the material efficiently and effectively and maybe even get to some of that vitally important stuff that’s always omitted because the semester runs out.

Or so the theory goes.

The reality is somewhat different.

The point of this column is not to trash transparencies and PowerPoint. We use PowerPoint all the time - in conference presentations and 5._____________ (INVITE) seminars, short courses, and teaching workshops. We rarely use pre-prepared visuals for teaching, however - well, hardly ever - and strongly advise against 6._____________ (RELY) on them as your main method of instruction.

Most classes we’ve seen that were little more than 50- or 75-minute slide shows seemed 7._____________ (EFFECT). The instructors flashed rapid and (if it was PowerPoint) colorful sequences of 8._____________ (EQUATE) and text and tables and charts, sometimes asked if the students had questions (they usually didn’t), and sometimes asked questions themselves and got either no response or responses from the same two or three students. We saw few signs of any learning taking place, but did see things similar to what George saw. If the students 9._____________ (NOT, HAVE) copies of the slides in front of them, some would 10._____________ (FRANTIC) take notes in a futile effort to keep up with the slides, and the others would just sit passively and not even try. It was worse if they had copies or if they knew that the slides would be posted on the Web, in which case most of the students who even bothered to show up would glance 11._____________ (SPORADIC) at the screen, read other things, or doze. We’ve heard the term “Death by PowerPoint” used to describe classes like that. The numerous students who stay away from them reason (usually correctly) that they have better things to do than watch someone drone through material they could just as easily read for themselves at a more convenient time and at their own pace.

This is not to say that PowerPoint slides, transparencies, video clips, and computer animations and 12._____________ (SIMULATE) can’t add value to a course. They can and they do, but they should only be used for things that can’t be done better in other ways.

TEXT 2 (B2)

Choose ONE phrase from the list of phrases A-I below to complete each of the following sentences 1-8. Remember, ONE phrase is extra here.

A can make it difficult to distinguish their intended meanings

B so be sure to monitor your audience's understanding of your accent

C reduce confusion by using simple words

D those who speak English with native-level fluency

E so it is better to use the long form instead

F when speaking to an international audience

G who are often ready to communicate

H that are understood universally among other native speakers

I yet they can be easily misunderstood and distracting