Category: Speaking

Teaching Presentation Skills

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy, Pronunciation, Speaking

Before I started in my current job, I’d taught a presentation course for two years when I was part time at one university, and also as parts of courses at two others. Everyone thinks that they know about presentations because everyone has seen presentations. That is like saying everyone knows how to teach because they have been to school, or everyone knows how to drive because they’ve been in a car or bus.

Ink drawing of a schoolgirl standing on a dead woodlouse monster.
One of my slides I used in the course.

Teaching Presentation Skills this Spring semester was one of the most successful courses I’ve ever taught. It was a mixture of in-person and in-class, and every in-class session was hybrid because there were some international students that couldn’t get landing permission due to COVID restrictions.

This being Japan-based, a lot of the teaching centred on design, both of posters and of slides. Japan is famed for its amazing graphic design. Sadly, this does not usually translate to amazing slides, in my experience. Also, most posters I have ever seen have necessitated getting up close and squinting. My eyesight is bad enough to need glasses but it’s still not dreadful; the fact is that a lot of posters are journal articles or essays in disguise.

So, the design message could have been ‘be minimal’. However, it wasn’t. Mostly it was, ‘Not everything that comes out of your mouth needs to be on screen/on your poster.’

Also, because these were university students, mainly in their first year, there also needed to be a lot of ‘Please do not read a script because it sounds dreadful. Know your material well enough to talk about it like a human. There is a great quote by EL Doctorow (in Lamott, 1995) about driving with car headlights and that you can’t see everything but you can see enough to find your way.

I also used some of the principles in Nancy Duarte’s books Resonate (2010) and Slide:ology (2008), as well as Garr Reynolds’ (2007) Presentation Zen. Basically, practice, think about why people communicate and what you want to see/hear when you watch a presentation, and how to make a persuasive call to action.

Largely, the design elements went incredibly well and some of the elements of good slide design made it across to work in other courses I taught to some of the same students, which is always good to see. However, with concentration on the what was being said, I noticed that for some students there was not enough ‘oomph’ in how they said it.

At the time I was reading English after RP by Geoff Lindsey, and it gave me an idea about intonation, especially in our international, Global Englishes (Rose & Galloway, 2018)/ELF (Jenkins, 1998) setting. If the pronunciation is clear, all well and good, but people need to hear the important parts, and follow along. With unpredictable rhythm, that has no reason other than memory blocks, people watching (i.e. other students) will have difficulty and stop paying attention, but by following a ‘normal’ rhythm, using stresses and feet, it is easier to get that polished feel in their presentations. This bit seemed to be most popular with the students, even if I felt a bit daft, clapping a metronomic beat as they mumbled their speeches to find the stresses.

With posters using the Better Posters template (Morrison, 2019) in Google Slides to work with a partner, and group presentations using Google Slides, some students were saying “Why can’t we use Canva?” and I explained that Google Slides is better for version control when collaborating. The final presentation was a solo presentation and could be given with any software they liked. Lots chose Canva, some Powerpoint, some Google Slides. All were at least OK and some were truly amazing.

I’m still going to tweak the course, by probably including an abstract submission as part of assessment, and connection to the abstract in order to reduce students rushing in the early hours instead of brainstorming early on in the process. If I can make it just as enjoyable and rewarding next time around I will be happy. And I know this sounds like a brag, but when you have successes (and creating the opportunities for students to shine is a success) you celebrate them.

References

Duarte, N. (2008) Slide:ology: The art and science of creating great presentations. Wiley

Duarte, N. (2010) Resonate: Present Visual stories that transform audiences. Wiley.

Jenkins, J. (2012). English as a Lingua Franca from the classroom to the classroom. ELT Journal, 66(4), 486–494. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccs040

Lamott, A. (1995) Bird by bird: Advice on writing and life. Anchor.

Lindsey, G. (2019) English After RP: Standard British Pronunciation Today. Palgrave.

Morrison, M. A. (2019, May 8). #betterposter. Retrieved from osf.io/ef53g

Reynolds, G. (2007) Presentation Zen. New Riders.

Rose, H., & Galloway, N. (2019). Global Englishes for language teaching. Cambridge University Press.

Pronunciation Resource Roundup Thing

Marc Jones / / Links, Materials, Pedagogy, Pronunciation

Thanks to @ClareBurkeELT for suggesting this might be a useful post.

ugly man with a beard pronuncing the /a/ sound, with badly drawn IPA symbol overlaid.

ELF Pron: https://elfpron.wordpress.com/ – a really useful blog about English as a Lingua Franca and pronunciation.

Pron Bites: http://pronunciationbites.blogspot.com/ – Marina’s blog is full of good stuff!

Pron SIG: website https://pronsig.iatefl.org/ – The Pronunciation SIG of IATEFL.

Richard Cauldwell’s Speech in Action: https://www.speechinaction.org/ Lots about pronunciation, more about listening.

Hancock Mcdonald website: http://hancockmcdonald.com/ Home of the best IPA chart for teachers and learners, in my opinion.

Seeing Speech: https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipa-charts/ Does what it says. Click an IPA chart symbol and see an ultrasound or MRI video with sound.

And here’s a word from me below to demonstrate how I might demonstrate stress in tone units.

Other pronunciation posts from me.

If you have anything else you think I’ve missed, that’s what the comments are for.

Assessment Proxies

Marc Jones / / assessment, Pedagogy, Speaking
Illustration of a laptop computer.

I don’t think quiet classes are an unusual problem to have, especially in university settings in Japan. There are usually ways and means to encourage students to interact and communicate in their English Communication courses when we’re face to face.

The problem comes when you are using web conferencing software to teach and are expecting/expected to get some kind of student interaction occurring. I’m not talking about cameras being turned off, here; that’s a different issue, and I kind of understand the reason behind it (the same thinking behind why you wouldn’t invite guests round if your home was unseemly to you). I’m talking about an unwillingness to communicate.

It’s not every student, but a sizeable number of them. They claim to be talking in their breakout groups after the fact, but when they notice I have joined the group, silence falls. Even when I tell them, “I can’t grade you on silence!” nothing much occurs rather than a muttering.

What can I do? I can either grade everyone at an F, which is unpleasant for everyone, or I can do something else. I need some assessment proxies, to show that students have been communicating in English with one another, just not in my presence. Here are some of them:

Record your group discussion task

This was unpopular but not terrible. It also gave me solid evidence (as opposed to disputable, unrecorded performance) about how little or how much students spoke in a task.

Co-written task

I don’t like it, to be frank, because there is less spoken interaction than I would like, and lots of writing, which is beyond the remit of the spoken communication lesson. With a quiet class there tends to be less coming to a consensus involved in group decision making and more devolving decisions to the strongest or keenest student in the group.

Other things that I could do are:

Make a video together

But this is essentially the same as ‘record your task’ but with more room for IT faff and unlikely to result in more English output.

Somebody’s going to say Flipgrid

Why would I ask students to install something on their phone when they can upload work to the LMS or the institutional cloud storage?

Record and transcribe discussion

This could work, but it is a lot of work if the discussion is long. It is also more to mark. However, it does allow for consciousness-raising of students’ own utterances. I have used student task transcription previously with my RPG course.

Produce a podcast or video, ideally for an authentic audience

This is unlikely to be a favourite task, to be honest. Additionally, if it is taken up with no enthusiasm, no authentic audience would want to listen to it, although individual work was done generally well when giving presentations about their favourite architecture.

So, these are some of my assessment proxies (or possible proxies) for interaction while synchronously using voice/video over internet. What are you doing with your quiet classes? Feel free to donate your ideas to me and my three readers!

Backchannel Bingo Redux

Marc Jones / / assessment, Listening, Speaking

So, this is a really short post because I am hideously tired but I wanted to note something useful here, kind of for myself, kind of to brag about the versatility of one of my resources.

Backchannel Bingo sheets (elementary PDF; intermediate PDF) can be used as way for your learners to analyse their own active listening strategies in a conversation. Here’s how.

  1. Go into breakout room in the video conferencing tool you are using.
  2. Learners set record (Zoom, Google Meet, Jit.si all have this but the first two may need it turned on by administrators if you have an institutional account).
  3. Learners converse for about 2-3 minutes.
  4. Stop recording.
  5. Learners watch video and see what strategies they used.

There’s another post here about the meatspace version of Backchannel Bingo.

Discussion Stations – an activity

Marc Jones / / Speaking

I have to teach with a coursebook once a week. It isn’t terrible but it kind of sets boundaries a bit on what the twenty five students feel they can talk about. To prepare them for an assessment I am busy sorting out, a timed discussion, and extend beyond the book, I set up the following activity:

  1. Talk with the person next to you about the biggest issues and problems regarding garbage on a world scale.
  2. Go around, take the major themes of these discussions. Set up 6 stations to talk about those themes, one theme per station. Students have 6 x 3 minutes to have short discussions. They must visit at least three stations, and may choose to stay longer at some if it is particularly interesting.
  3. When finished, log the three most interesting/striking/important points in their notebooks.
  4. Find three people that they didn’t talk to at all in our lessons that day. Have three different conversations about those points and the three other people’s points.
  5. Edit and add to their own points. Homework is to research a bit deeper.

I am going to follow this up with some work on discourse markers for argument structure next week.

The activity worked really well and I am likely to repeat it in the future for other EGAP/discussion classes. The students were really interested in making the topics their own and expanded upon it very well, with vocabulary fed in and a bit of hot correction.

This is a Journey into Sound – Part 2

Marc Jones / / Listening, Pedagogy, Pronunciation, Research

I was intending to have this up a lot earlier. Hopefully it gives some food for thought!

20190811_00002_001.jpg

References

* Hayes-Harb, R., Nicol, J., & Barker, J. (2010). Learning the Phonological Forms of New Words: Effects of Orthographic and Auditory Input. Language and Speech, 53(3), 367–381. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830910371460

** Mathieu, L. (2016). The influence of foreign scripts on the acquisition of a second language phonological contrast. Second Language Research, 32(2), 145–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658315601882

Showalter, C. E., & Hayes-Harb, R. (2013). Unfamiliar orthographic information and second language word learning: A novel lexicon study. Second Language Research, 29(2), 185–200. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658313480154

*** Glanz, O., Derix, J., Kaur, R., Schulze-Bonhage, A., Auer, P., Aertsen, A., & Ball, T. (2018). Real-life speech production and perception have a shared premotor-cortical substrate. Scientific Reports, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-26801-x

**** Iverson, P., & Kuhl, P. K. (1995). Mapping the perceptual magnet effect for speech using signal detection theory and multidimensional scaling. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97(1), 553–562. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.412280

Resource: Intonation Graphs

Marc Jones / / Listening, Pronunciation, Uncategorized

As regular readers know, I love phonology and anything to do with pronunciation and listening. I also have a need to make my learners aware of what happens in the stream of speech. They need to catch the intonation to be aware of any discourse functions, any attitudinal functions and, to the extent that they can be considered anything beyond rules of thumb, grammatical functions.
So, intonation graphs. Get the graph, draw the pitch and even write the words on the graph. Something like this.
A graph. X axis is Time. Y axis is Pitch. In the middle of the Y axis, parallel to the X axis is a midline. This graph shows the rough intonation pattern for Michael Caine's line in The Italian Job, "You're only suppose to blow the bloody doors off!"
Get it here as a Word document or PDF.

Pronunciation: a ragbag of activities, methods and ways to teach it

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy, Pronunciation

This post, ironically, is something I’ve put off writing for ages and ages, less because the topic is daunting but more because it’s dauntingly large and I could easily get carried away. However, Kamila, whose blog you should definitely follow, asked me to write something about pronunciation and so I will.wp-image-173208861.

Focus on FormS (i.e. pre-selected) or Focus on Form (i.e. reactive)?

I ago for the Focus on Form every time. If something needs to be taught, you’re going to have your students realise more easily if you can show them what they haven’t been able to do yet, get them to be able to do it afterwards, consider the difference, and go about their communication again.

Phonology

The IPA

Whenever I am giving feedback on phonology, I tend to use an IPA phonemic transcription, usually contrasting an error (i.e. improbable intelligibility) with a standard example (i.e. easily intelligible). Why? You can show that at the phonemic level that two sounds are different. This works, in my experience, with segmental phonology such as single phonemes, phonotactics (basically combinations of phonemes, and a clear example would be consonant clusters in standard English versus epenthesised consonants produced by L1 Japanese and Korean students, and also when looking at suprasegmental features like connected speech and also even intonation. Huh? Why?
I don’t really spend any time being explicit about learning IPA characters out of context. Mostly the characters make the sounds my students expect, with only a few exceptions among the vowels. Because it’s always there, it usually sinks in fairly well and fairly quickly. Also, nothing goes on the board with modelling and practice.

Sagittal diagrams and mouth shapes

Sagittal diagrams really have worked well. I normally draw sagittals up on the board whenever I need them instead of having a set of sagittals on PowerPoint like I feel I should. It’s second nature to me now but I do remember the steep learning curve.
For some sounds, you really need to show the mouth shape, too. I have used chalk drawings, photographs of my own mouth, and paused video in VLC to show the way people’s mouths look when they are articulating particular phonemes. The video one is particularly useful because you can show how the mouth moves from one sound to another smoothly, which is beneficial for making sounds more salient (easy to perceive) when listening (Hardison, 2018).
I usually give feedback on mouth shapes and point of articulation in really simple terms like “lips more spread”, “put your tongue in the place for /g/ but hold it and let the sound come through your nose” and such.

Stress and Rhythm

“English is a stress-timed language” chorused everyone on my DipTESOL during phonology brainwashing input sessions. I often demonstrate it by writing a short passage on the board (with transcription) and then have students mark the stresses, and check by speaking it and clapping. To make it more visually salient, I might flash open palms (thanks ELFPron – I can’t find that post I took your idea from) or stretch a brightly coloured (bunch of) rubber band(s). Depending on class size and space in my bag, I might also bring a triangle and beat it muted for unstressed syllables and open for stressed syllables and semi-muted for secondary stress. This might be easier for some than others.

Intonation

I know exaggerating intonation is really tempting but I don’t do it now because the mimickry makes me realise I sound like a dick when I do it. What I do instead is just mark it on the board and/or use gesture to make it more salient. I was, at one point, going to do a lot of classroom research on intonation teaching but I was really busy and it never happened but I could add it to the endless list of things I feel driven enough to add to a list but not driven enough to carry out.

References

Hardison, D. M. (2018) Effects of Contextual and Visual Cues on Spoken Language Processing: Enhancing L2 Perceptual Salience Through Focused Training, in Gass, S. M, Spinner, P. & Behney, J. (2018) Salience in Second Language Acquisition.

Other blogs

Hit the comments if you want to give other tips. Also, obviously, check out ELFPron and Pronunciation Bites.

"This is gold!"

Marc Jones / / Materials, Pedagogy, Speaking


I’ve been using Saboteur with an adapted Kotoba Rollers framework by James York with my university classes. I want talking with authentic tasks, which games provide. There is also transcription of language used. It isn’t all fun and games though.
In the game, players are either good, hardworking miners or saboteurs. None of the players know the roles of the others but they hardworking miners need to work together to get the gold. The saboteurs need to ensure the pack of cards is exhausted before the treasure cards are reached. There are also action cards such as breaking tools, fixing tools, causing rock falls and checking maps for gold, which may lead to cooperation or subterfuge.
The published rules are a bit tricky to understand. I had set the reading for homework, figuring that if there were a lot of difficulties the students would use dictionaries or Google Translate. This means my students skim read them superficially and did not bother to understand the rules fully before game play. Dictionaries and Google barely got looked at.
However, the rules needed a bit of clarification. This led to some good negotiation of meaning (Long, 1983). There are cards used to destroy the mine path above or break other players’ tools but they weren’t always easily understood.
The transcription is the main part I changed. I ask students to write three parts.

What did your partner say? Did they say it differently to how you would say it? How would you say it?

This has been done pretty well and is usually the best part of my RPG-based classes’ sheets, too.

What communication problems did you have? Why?

This sometimes ends up being a wishy-washy “I need to speak more fluently” but a lot of my students have gone a bit deeper.

If you spoke Japanese, what did you say? How can you say it in English?

This has an obvious function but students do sometimes half-arse it and just use Google Translate one way without checking the translation in a (monolingual) dictionary or Skell.
Still the work got done and there was another game of Saboteur in the following lesson to review. I was satisfied with this little Kotoba Rollers cycle, and so were my students, though I needed to buy 4 lots of the game for my big class.

References

Long, M. (1983) Native speaker/non-native speaker conversation and the negotiation of comprehensible input1. Applied Linguistics, 4 (2) pp. 126–141.

"A crazy motherfu…"

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy, Reflection, Speaking, Vocabulary

I’ve had swearing on my mind lately, and not just because I’ve spent most of my summer holidays staring at a bloody computer screen. I’ve been reflecting on it a bit.
I like reading Jean-Marc Dewaele’s stuff, especially the papers about swearing. See, I love to swear. This is probably down to social awkwardness and/or the milieu I grew up in. According to the British National Corpus, ‘fuck’ is used more among males, the working class and the less educated. (McEnery & Xiao, 2004 cited in Dewaele, 2017).
I, I was thinking about two bits of language use in my classroom. One of my students submitted her learning journal with a diary with a quite incongruent use of “her [reference to student’s friend] fucking face”. The other has been my use of songs with “fuck” in them (Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and I think it was a section of Jay-Z’s ‘Empire State of Mind’). All made me a bit squeamish.
I teach at a university but, what if students misuse swearing. Everyone seems to know “Fuck you!”, which in the Japanese context is almost a greeting, because it’s always kind of used like sarcastic “kirai” (“I hate you”) when somebody has had something slightly unwittingly derogatory said about them. But honestly, I’d hope they wouldn’t swear in a bar somewhere just in case they got their arse kicked or something. With songs, it seems like water off a duck’s back, and in hip hop, definitely part of the genre marking. So any smirks were about my possible discomfort in dealing with people who like Disney songs and who listen to songs by Austin Mahone about shagging all night in the context of ‘follow your passion’, which, you know, it could be.
Anyway, a couple of presentations on Eminem’s ‘Rap God’ and NWA’s ‘Straight Outta Compton’ passed over without event or sniggering. But, and I’m about to get to the real point now, should we be teaching swearing/emotional language? It could be incidental – “Bloody air conditioner!” or such, along with a contextual note or something. It just feels like we hide bits of the language from students. They see “fuck”. My junior high students know a lot of extremely shocking sexual words (it’s a boy’s school- bravado). But if there’s never any chance for practicing in context, at learner request or a recognition of need, then surely we’re leading them into a situation where they won’t know bugger all about how to respond, let alone whether their own effing and blinding is called for, weird, or outrageous.

Reference

Dewaele, J-M (2017) “Cunt” : On the perception and handling of verbal dynamite by L1 and LX users of English. Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication. Doi: 10.1515/multi-2017-0013