Tips for Great Presentations

Taken from:http://www.novamind.com/power-mind-mapping/1-note-taking.php
To be successful, you need to keep some key points in mind for every presentation. It doesn't matter who the audience is or what the talk is about.

The principles are always the same. When you follow these simple principles, your results will improve massively.
Tips For Great Presentations




Here is a "cheat sheet" for you to use for every presentation so that you engage the audience and give great presentations every time:

* Stick to keywords on your mind maps, and let your speech flow from there.
* Think of your audience as friends: they all want you to do your best!
* Keep an eye on the state of the listeners in the room.
* Tell stories: start early in your presentation, but don't finish the stories until right at the end. This will keep people involved.
* Have your projects and visual aids to the left side from the audience perspective - they will remember it better there.
* Think about what emotional states you want people in at different stages of your presentation, and design your content and your audience.
* Remember that you will have people who learn differently in your audience - make sure you cater to:
o Visual learners - by showing them things, and allowing them to "see" the "clear" benefits which they can "pick" to "show" them the way things are so they can "watch" and "see" the results.
o Auditory learners - by telling them things that they can "tune In" to, "harmonize" with and "listen to". Check that it "sounds good" to them. Make your message "clear as a bell", and ask them to "hear you out".
o Kinesthetic learners - by allowing them to "grasp" ideas and really "come to grips" with your message, they can catch "the drift" of what you are saying.

Structure your presentation so that you cover the areas of:

* Why they need to know this information
* What the information is
* How it all works
* What if the situation changes, or certain things happen, etc.

Keep questions until you get to the "What if" section of the presentation to make sure the message is covered and then, so that people know that there is going to be an opportunity for them to get their questions answered.

If you can add humor through images and words, all the better-it will be even more memorable.

Coverage of last year’s conference. Watch some of the presentations.
http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/dvd/
Cardiff blog. All the latest news about the 2009 conference and an opportunity to participate in the forum discussions.
http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/
Iatefl 2009 conference official website. Brochure and presenters’ abstracts.
http://www.iatefl.org/content/conferences/2009/index.php

Welcome to my blog.

This blog is a collection of links, notes and reflections around the topic of EAP.

I have created it to share my work and interests with my students and my colleagues.

Vocabulary

Academic word list:

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/averil-coxhead/awl/headwords.html (Headwords and sublists)
http://www.uefap.com/vocab/select/awl.htm (Headwords, sublists , definitions)
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/CiLL/eap/wordlists.htm (Headwords, definitions, example sentences, pronunciation)


Glossaries:

http://esl.about.com/od/businessvocabulary/English_Vocabulary_for_Business_and_English_for_Special_Purposes.htm

Vocabulary exercises:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/index.htm (highlighter and gapfinder based on the AWL)
http://www.academicvocabularyexercises.com/id17.htm (Gapfil exercises organised by sublist)
http://www.uefap.com/vocab/vocfram.htm
http://uvt.ust.hk/about.html (Multiple choice exercises based on key academic vocabulary)
http://ec.hku.hk/vocabulary/tutorial/tutorial_list.asp?subject=English&subject_ID=1&sub_subject_ID=1&sub_subject=Business_and_Economics (This site has excellent games)

Dictionaries:

http://www.lexicool.com/ . (directory of the online bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and glossaries for speakers of English as an additional language)
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/commerce
http://www.oup.com/oald-bin/web_getald7index1a.pl
http://www.yourdictionary.com/

Notes on vocabulary teaching

Students need to take an active role and link language with its function. It helps to look at the context of which the vocabulary is part: the situation (purpose and readership of the text) and the co-text. They also need to learn technical words.
So it is important to choose texts:
• For their functional purpose.
• For the technical words they contain

Students should be helped to:

1. Observe/ notice
2. Check understanding and function within the text/categorise
3. Experiment
4. Do exercises based on the texts they need to use
5. Recycle several times

Students know individual words but lack collocational competence.
So tasks must be designed that offer opportunities to do so.

Noticing
Produce materials that get ss to identify and become aware of lexical items through exposure to texts that contain them. One of the central activities in ESP teaching is to encourage students to identify language items in authentic materials.

1) Highlight in different colours: causes in blue, problems in red, solutions in green.
2) recording vocabulary in an organised, personalised and meaningful way: use tables or mind maps
3) gapfills using gapmakers
Focus on:

- Collocations
- academic/technical words
- Prefabricated lexical items (‘The ability to chunk language successfully is central to understanding of how language works' (Lewis, 1997).
- Functions

To check understanding, find meaning by:
A) Making sense of the new words by relating them to the topic you are reading about. The word field, for instance, has a different meaning when talking about agriculture, football or education.
B) Find words you already know that are related to the new words you are learning.
C) Use a concordancer to see example sentences which contain the word you want to learn more about.
D) Use a monolingual vocabulary
E) If English is not your first language, find a translation in a bilingual dictionary

2) Record highlighted vocabulary in an organised, personalised and meaningful way. This will help improve your understanding and also memorisation.
Group vocabulary in categories that you find useful. You could categorise by topic (accounting, marketing, products, services..) by function (cause and effect/ compare and contrast, causes, problems, solutions) or grammatical function (noun, verb,adverb,preposition). You can categorise vocabulary using a mind map or a table.
Place vocab on a cline according to strength of meaning, hedging positive/negative connotations
Record in terms of : what you can do, never do, want to do….
Record signalling words and link them to the info they refer to ( cause-signal-effect)
Keep a dictionary .

3) Experiment and re-use
Write some sentences in which you use the new vocabulary.
Write a summary that uses the new words.
Write a parallel text that about some aspect of the topic of which they have learned the vocab
Use to complete a task in which that vocabulary is needed:
matching pairs, sorting exercises, pictorial schemata, problem solving tasks, values clarification, discussion, posters, flashcards, games, role-play, including oral presentations and writing summaries
Collocations
Fixed phrases (in demand)
Nominalisation using abstract entities (the analysis reveals, this essay will examine, this research aims to, the data show…)
Use of metaphors (to tackle an issue, launch a company, branch)

Useful academic language:
• Cause and effect
• Compare and contrast
• Similarity and difference http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/2004/u3/pg61ex2similarityanddifference.htm
• Beliefs, opinions attitudes
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/2004/U4/beliefs_opinions_attitudes.htm
• Change and continuity
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/2004/u5/pg110ex6nounsandverbs.htm
• Formal vocabulary
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/2004/u6/pg137ex2idioms.htm

• Importance and unimportance
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/2004/u6/pg138ex6importanceandunimportance.htm
• Describing trends
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/exercises/trends.htm




References
http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues/teachingvocabulary.html
Lexical approach in ESP:
http://iteslj.org/Articles/Kavaliauskiene-LA.html
Alexander, , Argent, S and Spencer,J (2008) EAP Essentials. Reading: Garnet