HENK04211U CIP - Presentation Techniques for graduate students

In this course, students will develop oral presentation skills that will assist them in successfully completing their courses and exams in English-medium courses at graduate level in their own field of study. Students will develop oral skills in the following areas: structuring and delivering formal presentations; taking part in discussions; and producing appropriately formal language. Upon completion of the course, students should be able to produce general, academic and domain-specific spoken English approaching the C-1 level as defined in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).

Students who have passed the course should be able to:

• give a clear, well-structured presentation of a complex subject, expanding and supporting points of view at some length with subsidiary points, reasons and relevant examples;
• participate in academic discussions and negotiate meaning;
• effectively handle a question/answer session, responding spontaneously and almost effortlessly;
• express ideas and opinions with precision;
• present and respond to complex lines of argument convincingly;
• demonstrate fluency and ease of expression in complex stretches of speech;
• produce clear, smoothly-flowing and well-structured speech, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices;
• develop a good command of broad lexical repertoire, allowing gaps to be readily overcome with circumlocutions;
• develop a good command of idiomatic expressions and collocations;
• maintain good grammatical control; non-systematic errors and sentence structure flaws may still occur, but they are rare and can often be corrected in retrospect;
• develop pronunciation which is clearly intelligible in an English-medium environment.

This is a workshop-style course with a focus on interactive discussions and practice presentations. Success on the course requires active participation and attendance (75%). Students are expected to draw on readings in their own discipline to submit an exam presentation as well as the research material on which the presentation is based.