In the hunt for perfection: speaking in public

Wednesday, 11 May 2011

Now me as an adult student of French

Now me as an adult student of French

I have writing about my students, about what I do to teach, giving some thought to how my adults learn. With this post I'll give this a different twist for a moment:

On how many occasions have I wanted to speak more languages! On how many occasions have I regretted not studying French and German when my mum was pushing me to! Yet, it's never too late! I envy those who speak three or four foreign languages and I have set out to learn French for once and for all!

Background:I am in my mid 30s and I took up French classes last September. I'd done French for one academic year when I was 15 at secondary school, with a really bad teacher. Nobody speaks highly of her, so it's not just my experience. Then, took a three-month course at uni as part of the Introduction to French and French literature, of which the language bit was an overall idea of how French works as a language and its phonemes as a means to distiguish sounds. Pronunciation is the hardest area of French learning for me, the switch between open a , e the neutral vowel, the nasal a, oe sounds etc is really hard! All of us who teach and learn and speak the gallic language know how important it is to get the sound right if you don't want to be ridiculised and laughed by Parisians.
After that in about 10 years ago I took a summer refresher course for a month. So i've never learned more than what would be level 1, if this at all.

Last summer, I armed myself with old exercise books and online grammars and exercises and reviewed as much as my time allowed me to in order to be placed at level 2 of the school I was going to register for the course. I must say that I like languages, I teach English as a foreign language after all, and I've tried every single opportunity life has put before me to practise French, which has now had its rewards. I am a risk taker and thanks to my travelling to French speaking countries and possibly aptitude i secured i place in the level I thought corresponded to my knowledge or degree of command. I was not going to start all over again after all, i feel i've done level one two or three times in my life before, none of them being a proper level 1, just complete and false beginner!After the level test: written and oral, the oral examiner would have assigned me level 3, which I was not prepared for, hardly having a good command of the two most basic tenses but I felt very flattered. The fact that I had studied French over 10 years ago, practised it only when booking hotel rooms and ordering at restaurants and having limited conversations with people when travelling the country, astonished the examiner. The command i seemed to have for that limited input and output apparently was fairly good. I think it's more the risk-taking nature of mine in this case.

I can see the theory behind the endlessly repeated idea that if you do homework and review regularly you make quicker progress.
I learn by associating words or grammar items to English or to Catalan. We can't help using our mental patterns to learn new things, we compare to what we know, to what we are used to, to what we experience and to our standards and ideas, and I am stretching and extending the idea to not only language learning here. (the idea that it is very xxx or not very xxx is measured to our own idea of xxxx)
I am pro-active, and participate as much as my common sense allows for if/when interested in the subject we are dealing with. Common sense? I'd be interacting with the teacher and other classmates a lot more if I could but the nature of the situation prevents me from doing so. Not only because I am very much aware that one learns to speak by speaking (and listening too, no need to say) but because I, as a teacher as well, simpathise with the teacher when she wants one of us to step forward and say something and I may be more fluency-oriented than accuracy! (I wonder what she's going to react to this if she ever gets to read this bit! :-). It's not a matter of the less shy students dominating the "mis en commun" or plenary debates as it has been the cases on a couple of occasions! You learn to speak by speaking. You overcome the fear by fully being aware that you will make mistakes, that you will get stuck for a word or a tense or a sound mispronounced at times and that it's part of the learning process, not a weakness and it's ok if others laugh with you at a mistake you make. It's fine. That's my approach and that's the attitude I promote among my students.
It's 25-30 of us in a class and I don't want to manipulate the plenary speaking times. That is the risk-taking. I think in my L1, hard not to. I am even more aware of that.

I wonder how or to what extent does me being a teacher helps me in my learning of French.

not finished, more shortly

Thursday, 18 November 2010

Confident presentations

Now I am going to post a compilation of links and phrases i have found which give very interesting advice on giving presentations. This is going to be of use for those whose confidence is a bit shaky when having to prepare for and give presentations.

The piece of advice i, as a teacher, would give you is that preparation is the key to success and that it's normal to be nervous, very few people do not get nervous when having to speak in public. The other big piece of advice is not to panick when you you find yourself in a sticky situation, like not remembering how to say something in English or if you realise you've forgotten to say something important or any these little glitches and problems. These can happen to absolutely every person on earth, ok some more often than others but hey!, whether it is giving presentations in a foreign or in your own language. The key is to be prepared. This posting will give you the resourses for many of the potential situations you may face when presenting.

Good reading and watching!

The following is taken from:

http://www.effective-public-speaking.com/starting/menu.php
More links below

In modern English, presentations tend to be much less formal than they were even twenty years ago. Most audience these days prefer a relatively informal approach. However, there is a certain structure to the opening of a presentation that you should observe

1. Get people's attention

2. Welcome them

3. Introduce yourself

4. State the purpose of your presentation

5. State how you want to deal with questions

Get people's attention

If I could have everybody's attention · If we can start. · Perhaps we should begin? · Let's get started

Welcome them

Thank you for coming today. · Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. · On behalf of our company, I'd like to welcome you.

Introduce yourself

My name's Jane Shawre. I'm responsible for travel arrangements.

· For those of you who don't know me, my name's Tom Strwotter.

· As you know, I'm in charge of public relations.

· I'm the new Marketing Manager.

State the purpose of the presentation

This morning I'd like to present our new processor.

· Today I'd like to discuss our failures in the Japanese market and suggest a new approach.

· This afternoon, I'd like to report on my study into the German market.

· What I want to do this morning is to talk to you about our new mobile telephone system.

· What I want to do is to tell you about our successes and failures in introducing new working patterns.

· What I want to do is to show you how we've made our first successful steps in the potentially huge Chinese market

State how you want to deal with questions.

· If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them as we go along.

· Feel free to ask any questions.

· Perhaps we can leave any questions you have until the end?

· There will be plenty of time for questions at the end

My recommendation is to learn the couple of expressions in each section you fell more comfortable with by heart.

You'll notice or have noticed that Let's and I'd like to, I am going to... come up very often, these are what you want to start using!

http://www.business-english.com/signposting/exercise1.html

http://www.effective-public-speaking.com/

GIVING PRESENTATIONS: USEFUL LANGUAGE

1. If you get your facts wrong.

I am terribly sorry. What I meant to say was this.
Sorry. What I meant is this.

2. If you have been going too fast and your audience is having trouble keeping up with you.

Let me just recap on that.
I want to recap briefly on what I have been saying.

3. If you have forgotten to make a point.

Sorry, I should just mention one other thing.
If I can just go back to the previous point, there is something else that I forgot to mention.

4. If you have been too complicated and want to simplify what you said.

So, basically, what I am saying is … this.
So, basically, the point I am trying to get across is this.

5. If you realize that what you are saying makes no sense.

Sorry, perhaps I did not make that quite clear.
Let me rephrase that to make it quite clear.

6. If you cannot remember the term in English.

Sorry, what is the word I am looking for?
Sorry, my mind has gone blank. How do you say ‘escargot’ in English?

7. If you are short of time. Time is running out.

So just to give you the main points.
As we are short of time, this is just a quick summary of the main points.

8. When you want to make your next point, you ‘move on’.

Moving on to the next point.

I’d like to move on to the next point if there are no further questions.

9. When you want to change to a completely different topic, you ‘turn to’.

I’d like to turn to something completely different.

Let’s turn now to our plans for next year.

10. When you want to give more details about a topic you ‘expand’ or ‘elaborate’.

I’d like to expand more on this problem we have had in Chicago.

Would you like me to expand a little more on that or have you understood enough?

I don’t want to elaborate any more on that as I’m short of time.

11. When you want to refer back to an earlier point, you ‘go back’.

Going back to something I said earlier, the situation in Chicago is serious.

I’d like to go back to something Jane said in her presentation.

12. When you want to refer back to an earlier point, you ‘go back’.

Going back to something I said earlier, the situation in Chicago is serious.

I’d like to go back to something Jane said in her presentation.

13. To just give the outline of a point, you ’summarize’.

If I could just summarize a few points from John’s report.

I don’t have a lot of time left so I’m going to summarize the next few points.

14. To repeat the main points of what you have said, you ‘recap’.

I’d like to quickly recap the main points of my presentation.

Recapping quickly on what was said before lunch, ……

15. For your final remarks, you ‘conclude’.

I’d like to conclude by leaving you with this thought ……

If I may conclude by quoting Karl Marx …….

I always recommend taht you learn the expressions and phrases you feel more at ease with and that you personalise them, study them by using your name, your company's name, etc.

Links and resources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/business/talkingbusiness/unit3presentations/1opening.shtml it has several links within the same tab

http://www.business-english.com/signposting/exercise1.html

http://www.effective-public-speaking.com/

www.Ted.com as examples of fantastic presentations: visuals, warm-ups, jokes, tone of voice, emphasis…

English 365 (CUP) purple and bluish book both have material and listenings

In company (MacMillan), unit 12

Business Vocabulary in Use (CUP) written by Bill Mascull has also material on that.

Videos on www.youtube.com :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmjGz4PS6sI&p=CBC9B0E3479C39F4&playnext=1&index=44

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-z_yBrS3s&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdGgDEjmGhM&NR=1