Student Oral Presentations

My open letter to Juan Aninao, who's seeing how ESL 142 is taught and how it does or doesn't prepare students for ESL 79.

Dear Juan,
As I mentioned in an e-message, during my sabbatical I sat through some student presentations in which the students read whole paragraphs they'd copied from our textbook.  One of our former colleagues, Pat Anesi, who died in 1995, had a concept I'll try to use here:  Use positive verbs in your feedback.  So instead of focusing on what they didn't do, I'll say what they need to do in the future (and what a few good presenters actually did).  I'm going to be sure my speaking and listening students at every level give at least one presentation in which they practice these steps:

  Prepare note-cards instead of a written report.  (I had ESL 79 students prepare a written report first—especially for the persuasive talk--and then they took key words/names from the written report.)

Use content words instead of complete sentences on these cards. (I know this is hard because it means that they won't have the crutch of the complete sentence to lean on when they're speaking in a second language.)

Prepare visuals such as key words or names--large enough to read from the back of the room.

Practice so you can speak with confidence.

Look at the students you're speaking to and make eye contact with some.  (We practice this in class, and after each person speaks, I say "Raise your hand if X made eye contact with you."  Eventually the student speakers ask "Raise your hand if I made eye contact with you.")

Speak naturally instead of reciting.

Speak (and here I can't avoid a "Don't") 
Don't read.  (Exception:  There may be a short quote the student can read in its entirety.)

I'm not one of our most successful teachers.  (I think you are.)  I don't have throngs of students coming back to me to tell me how much they learned from me.  However, I have had students come back to say that they were applauded in a class (say, psychology) because they knew how to give an oral report.  "Everyone else was just reading, but I used a chart and note cards the way you taught us."  I so rarely feel that what I teach is what they learn and practice, so this feedback makes me feel really good when I get it. 

During my sabbatical  most of the student presenters were native English speakers. Our ESL students who have paid attention to our coaching for presentations could teach native speakers a lot!

As for ESL 79, when I taught it, I thought we should have a workshop to share our totally different approaches with one another.  I used the very old but very good (in my opinion) Porter book,Communicating Effectively in English, which focuses on public speaking of different types.  I still think of ESL 79 as a class for giving oral presentations and a class in which speaking and listening skills  are practiced in the context of these presentations (and the group work and discussion leading up to them).  I think of the lower levels as being practice in listening and speaking skills, not as much in presentations.  I am very happy with the textbooks College Oral Communication because they stress listening and speaking in an academic context and have vocabulary for different disciplines and a logical progression from step to step.   But now, after my sabbatical experience, I've vowed to include at least one presentation in the lower levels to teach the concepts even if it's "just" introducing another student.