Developing the skills to communicate in spoken English

Intepreting is a public activity; it’s done in the company of others. So we can prepare to stand up and bare our proverbial souls to one another in class, we’ll spend some time getting used to perfoming in a public manner.

Here are some bullet points/learning outcomes of which we might want to be aware:

• What behaviors are expected in a public presentation? How should we consider formality (register), word choice, prosody, and anything else in a public environment?
• Given the formality and presentation type, how should we structure our discourse?

Readings/Discussions

Presentation Tips for Public Speaking

Tips for and portal to links dealing with how to give a public presentation. You’ll need this for our first assignments. Required

Pecha Kucha

The Japanese have long figured out concise, efficient, and interesting ways to give presentations (e.g., Takahashi Method or Kawasaki Method). More recently, the concept of Pecha Kucha (ペチャクチャ, Japanese for ‘chit chat’), like Kawasaki, encourages twenty slides at twenty seconds each. What impact does this have on how you organize your information?

Tips for a TED talk-like presentation

Although this is not a public speaking class, there is something to be said for capturing the intent of a signer’s text by creating equivalent emotional [prosody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics) in your delivery of the interpretation.

Bonus link: Julian Treasure teaches how to use sound in presentations to improve conversational style.

How to Start a Speech and Improve Your Speaking

Interesting pair of videos by public speaking instructor Conor Neill that are helpful in creating (beginning?) engaging presentations for people.