Steve Gershon has been a lecturer for the past 20 years in locations such as China, Japan and the U.S. and shares a his approach for teaching presentation skills. This article continues on from Evolving an approaching to presentation skills – Part 1.
Adapting a process approach
The process approach was developed in the 1970s in the US, mainly to teach literacy and writing skills to children in elementary schools (Sun and Feng, 2009). As the term implies, the focus of the teacher’s attention and lesson planning is not so much on the finished ‘product’, but rather on the writing ‘process’, i.e. the stages a writer normally engages in to produce a finished text. In this sense, the ‘product’, whether it’s a descriptive paragraph, a story, or an academic essay, is viewed as the culmination of several individualized, often recursive, steps or stages (Murray, 1990). For teachers, one important benefit of a process approach is that it helps students to understand what writers actually do when they write, in turn, helping them to become more independent writers. It also provides teachers with a reality-based lesson framework that is readily transferable to a variety of writing topics and genres.
The lesson framework often revolves around a series of key questions that writers must tackle, either implicitly or explicitly, when they are attempting to construct a text:
- What do I write about?
- Who is/are my reader/s?
- What information do I include?
- What language do I need for this genre & topic?
- How do I structure/organize my text?
- What stylistic techniques can enhance my text?
- How can I make the composition better?
Of course, as I could see when struggling with a viable structure to frame my first presentation skills course, it wouldn’t take much tweaking to apply these key questions to constructing an oral text, such as a speech or presentation:
- What do I write talk about?
- Who is/are my readers / listeners?
- What information do I include?
- What language do I need for this genre & topic?
- How do I structure/organize my text presentation?
- What stylistic performance techniques can enhance my text delivery?
- How can I make the composition presentation better?
Applying the process
With those tweaks in place, the crucial task for me was to see how those key questions could be put to work in forming a sequence of lessons that would target the natural flow of decisions and tasks involved in planning, composing, and delivering an effective presentation. So, after quite a bit tinkering and a few more semesters of teaching, and the necessary editorial scrutiny that comes with writing a presentation skills course book, what has evolved naturally over time is a lesson framework that includes the following stages:
- Exploring the topic to help students access their background knowledge and generate ideas they can use later to plan their own presentation
- Focusing on language to highlight useful vocabulary, expressions and sentence patterns that would naturally occur in the context of speaking about the target topic
- Organizing ideas to develop awareness of how ideas are brainstormed, selected and then slotted into the structure of an outline
- Adding impact to the body (main content) of a presentation with a strong introduction and conclusion
- Developing presentation techniques to enhance the delivery of a presentation through the effective use of note cards and visual aids, eye contact, body language, and the voice.
Of course, the above lesson sequence has evolved in tandem with my own teaching experiences, my views of language learning, and my preferred teaching style. However, I’m well aware that there are several different, yet equally viable approaches and structures that can be used to design a presentation skills course, depending on the goals, the context, and the needs of the students. With all of them, the key feature will always be to provide students with a readily transferable set of tools and skills they can use independently to plan and give effective presentations on a range of topics in a variety of situations.
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