Oral Presentations

I’ve been rethinking the assignment of oral presentations recently, in part because they’re still common in first-year composition courses, in part because I’ve used them in the past in literature courses, and in part because they would seem to fit in with other active learning strategies. I’ve assigned them formally in the past, I ask for informal presentations as a regular part of my current active learning classes, and I have tried both individual and group presentations over the years; but as I’ve been working to integrate my strategies to make them more complementary, I want return my attention to how I design and assign these presentations.

In many ways, of course, speaking to an audience about a subject or to present an argument reinforces learning and promotes more exact thinking much as writing does. And certainly as both effective writing and speaking require a command of rhetoric this seems a natural pairing in composition courses (as they had been paired for centuries). Moreover, like writing, speaking may have pedagogical applications across disciplines and, indeed, there are efforts to promote this that are analogous to programs that promote writing across disciplines. In short, I remain convinced of the effectiveness of oral presentations; however, I would like to be as deliberate in how I design these assignments as I am when designing written ones.

I learned years ago, for instance, that however much anxiety writing may produce in students, it is often greatly surpassed by that which speaking in class creates (as if I didn’t know that from personal experience anyway). This is something Gloria Nicosia addresses in her article “Implementing Public Speaking Skills Across the Curriculum.” In particular she identifies students of English as a second language, students whose accents or dialect make them fearful of linguistic prejudice, and students who come from cultures dissimilar from that of their audience as feeling especially anxious about oral presentations. Nicosia, therefore, recommends establishing a clear form, such as reporting on a source, a chapter, or an essay with main points extracted in simple direct syntax for the comprehension of listeners; specifying an organization, such as introduction, purpose, important facts, and how to apply them; and, finally, discussing how most effectively to deliver the content, emphasizing components like volume, tone, eye contact, gestures, and de-emphasizing techniques like reading and memorizing.

I’ll soon be planning course schedules for the spring in composition and literature, all in active learning classrooms, and I would like to scaffold oral assignments into them in a structure that lays them parallel with their writing and reading assignments and, I hope, in a way that makes all the assignments mutually reinforcing.