Course Description
This English for business presentations course will do is make you more comfortable speaking in public, allow you to give more effective presentations in English, and help you generate better presentation visuals. You will be able to hold the audience’s attention, be more understandable, and get better results. We will cover many things in this course including: presentation style; use of your voice; pronunciation and intonation; useful phrases; presentation design; and presentation practice.
For style we will look at videos of people giving a presentation and decide what gestures, mannerisms, use of voice, etc. would work for you. These can play a key role in your presentation. We will work on taking the different features of different presenters and develop a style that suits you. Then we will practice this style so that it becomes part of you.
Pronunciation and intonation will be practiced using exercises, short talks, and teacher analysis of your speaking. Better pronunciation will enhance the experience of your listener and result in more acceptance and listening. The end result will be better for you and your company.
We will look at useful phrases and sentences for different parts of a presentation including: introduction; transitioning from one topic to another; summarizing; concluding; etc. There will be plenty of practice to use these phrases in the different parts of a presentation.
Designing your presentation is an essential part of the course that will include looking at the process to design and develop a presentation. The best way is to start from the result that you want then design the presentation around this. There are some other pieces to the process that we will review in this course.
We will also review how to use PowerPoint and some of its many features. One feature we will definitely study is animation. This feature allows you to bring in your different points one at a time, or in other ways. Other things we will look at is the maximum number of words to use per slide and the use of graphics and pictures.
As always there will be practice presentations where you will have the chance to use the things that we have learned and get feedback on how to improve. There will also be speaking practice such as short talks where you can work on your pronunciation and intonation, use of the phrases for different parts of the presentation, transitions, your style, and your confidence. We will not forget homework and there will be some exercises that you will be able to do outside of class.