Title: Unit 9: Helping a Tutee with an Oral Presentation
Course: STEP DEV > Section: Tutoring Speaking

Objectives

- Identify the role that the tutor plays when helping a tutee with an oral presentation.

- Recognize the important steps in organizing, preparing visual aids and practicing a presentation.

- Recognize the need for breaking down the oral into parts and repeating.

Introduction

When helping a tutee with an oral presentation, you should follow the same five steps as any other lesson.   

For most people, giving an oral presentation is very stressful.  However, with good preparation some of that stress can be transformed into a very rewarding experience.  You should not help your tutee with the research they need to do for the presentation, but you can help them with organizing, preparing visual aids and practicing.

Organization

If your tutee arrives with a text of their presentation, remind them that it is incredibly boring to listen to someone reading their presentation or when they sound like they have memorized it. Moreover, most likely, their teacher will not allow them to keep the text with them. Instead, help them create an outline by cutting down their text to its main ideas and keywords for the supporting points.
In doing so, they will ensure that their presentation is organized in a logical manner and that it can be used during the presentation. Furthermore, it will keep them on track and remind them of any important points without having to memorize.
The outline can be put on a sheet or cue cards depending on the preference of the presenter.  Complete sentences should not be used, except perhaps for key sentences that they want to use in the introduction and conclusion.  They should be there only for security and should not be read.

The outline should be organized as follows:

Visual Aids

A good PowerPoint or Google Slides can replace the need for an outline.  However, it should have no sentences unless it is a quotation.  If there is too much information, then it will distract the audience from what the presenter is saying. The number of slides for each main idea will depend on the number of supporting points.   The PowerPoint should be used when appropriate during the presentation to draw the audience’s attention to words, pictures or charts.

These visual aids should be organized as follows:

Practice

Once the tutee has organized the presentation effectively with an outline or other visual aids, the key to an excellent presentation is practice.   The tutee should not memorize the presentation except for  the introduction and the conclusion.  Instead, of learning the speech by heart, they should focus on becoming very familiar with its organization and content, which will enable them to focus on getting their message across. Practicing many times will make them feel comfortable and clear up any pronunciation and grammar difficulties.

You can tell your tutee when they are practicing at home to pretend they are  in front of an audience and do the following:

·         Stand up unless it is a seminar format.

·         Pretend you are looking at different audience members.

·         Speak dynamically and louder than usual.

·         Point to your visual aids when appropriate.

PRE-ACTIVITY

1. When helping a tutee with a presentation, you would first confirm that the tutee has followed the instructions properly (STEP 1) and then you would discuss the content and organization of it.  What do you think you should do in STEP 3, 4 and 5?

ACTIVITY

STEP 3:  Controlled and Communicative Exercises

The key to practising an oral is to break it up into parts. So, start with the introduction and repeat it until the tutee is comfortable doing the following:

·         looking at you

·         speaking clearly and dynamically

·         u sing an outline or PowerPoint effectively.

While they are presenting the introduction

- Make notes of the difficult words, phrases or sentence that they had trouble with or any point that is not clear, as well as  grammar errors that they can correct easily.

Then, when they are finished practicing the introduction

- Show the tutee the notes and apply corrective feedback techniques.

- Instruct the tutee to present the introduction again.

o   Would you present the introduction again?

When they are comfortable with the introduction

·         Instruct the tutee to repeat the same process for the other main ideas and the conclusion.

STEP 4: Production Task

·         Instruct the tutee to repeat the whole presentation as many times as necessary.

STEP 5: Final Review

·         Review the parts and words the tutee had difficulty with.

Oral Presentation Resource

When you are helping a tutee with an oral presentation, make sure to have the following reading resource close by.

POST-ACTIVITY

Click on the button and take the post-activity quiz.