Tag: presentation

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.

You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone (status update)

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

Well, the Summer was busy and the start of the Autumn was quite busy too. I was supposed to be revising a paper to get it published but what happened was that I revised it and still didn’t get it published because it is the account of unsystematic mess.

I went to the busiest conference I’ve been to so far (New Sounds 2019) and met lots of phonology and phonetics people. I presented and didn’t mess up, so it was relieving because I felt a bit like a fish out of water. Or Aquaman’s weakling brother.

There was the usual stress over student questionnaires, which is unreasonable because I know that much of the feedback is positive or neutral but my brain focuses and cycles through the negative stuff as my own cinema of the damned. I am just about over it now (thanks to slightly out of sync workplaces), and wish I could find a way to just move on from this.

Other than that, I had my first overnight trip with students which was quite fun, even if I wouldn’t choose those activities myself. Directly after that, I had the start of the semester, so I had to remember what I planned at the start of the summer (and what I planned to change).

Anyway, here is some stuff that is working for me:

LMS as document repository so I don’t spend hours a week photocopying.

Adapted Cornell notes, for myself, and also for my (intermediate and up) listening students, which will likely be written up soon as a blog post.

Bullet Journaling for myself (still) for daily agenda and log and ultrashort lesson plans which is exactly as you imagine.

Whose Cared A Lesson In? excitELT Tokyo 2018 hangout summary

Marc Jones / / Listening, Materials

Well, hello. This is a summary of my hangout at excitELT 2018 at Rikkyo University’s Ikebukuro Campus. It was really good fun and the best thing was just nattering to people I know from Twitter and meeting new people!

Boom-Box@High

My slides are here, but because it was a ‘hangout’, there was audience participation, and this is what I am going to put in this post.

What’s missing from materials for listening?

Michael Griffin

  • A range of speakers: kids, seniors, non-native speakers.
  • A variety of subjects, especially interesting/useful subjects.

Matt Shannon

  • Natural language, especially at a low enough level for junior high and high school students.
  • Clear intonation patterns.

What are some activities we could use to teach/practice bottom-up listening?

Matt Shannon

  • Spelling bee.

There was also the discussion that listening can be taught with a reactive focus on something students have found difficult rather than “something pulled out of your arse” (Jones, 2018)¹.
Also, it was discussed, especially with Matt Shannon and Ruthie Iida, that some teachers in Japan are teaching English using kana, thus making it ‘easier’ for students to pronounce words, though this might render them less intelligible than if they were taught standard pronunciation of, especially vowels such as /ɜː/, /ɔː/ and /ʌ/ which can be important for contrasts, which might make the differences between Japanese and English phonological categories clearer. I said also my dream would be having enough time on the curriculum for children to be taught pronunciation using the IPA without stressing parents, teachers and kids that they can’t pick it up. However, I’ve changed my mind about this, and teaching absolute beginners without orthography might be a good idea based upon Mathieu (2016), until there is a critical mass of vocabulary or evidence of contrastive phonemes having been learned.
Comments, are more than welcome.

References

Jones, M. (2018) Whose Cared A Lesson In. (‘Hangout’ Presentation) excitELT Tokyo, May 6th 2018.

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

Footnotes

1. I said, “I could mince my words, but I don’t think I will.” Listening and pronunciation can make you angry, I tell you.

Here be (Dungeons and) Dragons 8

Marc Jones / / assessment, Pedagogy, Reflection


We’re almost near the end of the first term of my RPG classes and I’m already looking forward to the summative assessment. This is because the students at Ladies’ College of Suburban Tokyo are amazingly motivated for the most part and because the students at University of Outside Tokyo are repeaters who had to retake English Communication, and have shown a great deal of motivation, too, or at least the students who come regularly. My supervising professor at UOT has told me that if one third of the students pass, then that ought to be seen as a success. As it stands, we should be on for 4 definites, 5 probables and 3 unlikelies. At LCST, all the students should pass because everyone does the work, even if it is not always amazing it is always done.
I managed to ask some of the students at UOT the other day if they actually like the course as a game and they said yes. (Of course, they did. They won’t tell you it’s crap because you grade them, Marc.)
What negatives I did get were that one student said he didn’t like recording himself because it was a pain in the arse; however, this student also finds attendance a pain in the arse, too. My most regular attendee said recordings were difficult to manage. This is why I told him to make sure he kept a copy and also sent a copy to me.
Anyway, long story short: still loving it, waiting to see portfolios, deal with the recordings.
I am also giving a workshop on this at JALT Saitama’s Nakasendo conference on Sunday. I have presented before but never run a workshop for more than six teachers at once before. If you read this say hello!
Read Here be (Dungeons and) Dragons previous ‘chapters’: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Japanese New Year – free lesson 'plan'

Marc Jones / / Lesson Plan, Materials, Uncategorized

This is entirely user-generated content. You don’t even need to print out the sheet or give out the prompt cards. It’s basically a Task-Based lesson stewed in a Dogme-heavy sauce.
You have the learners explain and give mini presentations on different aspects of New Year. If you have international students, this will really help the others in their group as they will probably have tons of questions. They could also give differences and similarities between New Year in their countries and in Japan. Feel free to change it up, pass it on, etc. It is Creative Commons licensed.
There is a load of repetition so good chances for Task rehearsal and the tasks should be more fluent by the end. Find the sheet as a PPT and PDF in my Google Drive folder.

Status Update/MEES Michinohe.

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

OK, so in the last week, this blog has massively increased it’s readership (great thanks to all who shared the post on Coursebooks).
Aomori
I gave my presentation at MEES Michinoku at Hachinohe Gakuin University and found it wasn’t as contentious as I thought it might have been. I have no scars from things being thrown at me. I also got the chance to meet a lot of cool people and I saw some interesting presentations with practical application to my classroom practice. Of particular note was John Campbell-Larsen’s plenary about discourse/conversation analysis and corpus findings about common speech and conversation. There was two particularly fascinating sections on backchannelling and evaluating in conversations that have helped my students in the last few days.
The slides from my presentation are here if you want to have a look at them, and there may be even a YouTube later so you can see just how nervous I felt!
In the meantime, I’ve had loads of back and forth on Twitter/blog comments with Rose Bard and Glenys Hanson, both of whom I wholeheartedly recommend!