Poster Presentation

Easing Agricultural Graduate Students
into Scientific Poster Presentations

Glen Hill
Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine
Many resources exist for teaching how to create a scientific poster. They tend to focus on
the layout design, but that is only part of the problem for second language students. Oncea poster is displayed, some students will expect the information to speak for itself, and theydread the moment when they have to talk to visitors. With a dearth of language courses inthe latter half of undergraduate life, graduate students at a science university in Hokkaido
lack the necessary English explanatory skills to talk to visitors about what they have written
on the poster. This paper will describe some lessons intended to provide confidence andexperience in using spoken English to describe scientific information at a poster presentation.
A weekly lab news conversation practice is introduced as a unique lesson plan in the syllabus.

Graduate students in scientific fields often display their research data as conference
posters to be shown at professional meetings. Sharing such information in a
poster format is different from a slideshow presentation or journal paper, which
are arguably more difficult to do. Posters accomplish communication of the data
in a more casual setting and with authentic material to concentrate on linguistic
or content aims as well as social interaction ( Jost, 2005) and encourage criticalthinking. Construction of posters also improves graphical representation ofdata (Boggu & Singh, 2015). Since English is the common language of science,
it is needed for two purposes: to draft the text on the poster and to interact
with visitors who want to learn more. However, most science and engineering
students in Japan usually do not take English courses after their second year as
undergraduates, so their conversational and written skills often decline by thetime they reach graduate school.
This gap in language learning poses problems in communication and causes
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emotional stress. Non-native English majors in science often recognize theimportance of English and their own inadequacies (Tardy, 2004). Graduate
students at the current university also complain that creating and preparing topresent a poster in English takes time away from their research, which has greaterpriority in the minds of students and their advisors.

Curriculum Description from Undergraduate toGraduate School

Obihiro University (OU) requires one English course per semester for thefirst three semesters. Consequently, students end up in roughly equal numbers
in a reading, or writing, or oral communication section in the first year. Only
those who passed the writing courses could take the third semester course intechnical writing, but extremely few do that. This arrangement creates lopsided
opportunities for students to learn four skills in English, and very few take any
elective English courses after these three mandatory ones.
In 2009, OU created a mandatory English course for graduate students thatwould help them make presentations and hold conversations about casual andresearch topics at scientific conferences. Most of the Japanese students wereamong the lowest in English reading, writing, listening, and speaking proficiency,
so their 2.5-year gap of English studies was not the only cause for concern inproviding a workable syllabus. Each of the course sections consisted of 12-14
students (mostly Japanese, mostly from OU) and was taught by a different native
English speaker. The course was mandatory, and it was the only English course in
the graduate school program. Several language goals had to be accommodated,so only a limited amount of time was available for poster presentation training.

Language Fears and Consequences

Graduate students at OU often prepare Japanese or English posters for exhibitions
on campus as well as for conferences in Japan and abroad. These are typically partof their ongoing research, and many are displayed afterward in the halls outside of
their laboratories. Students who attended foreign conferences express trepidation
about meeting English-speaking visitors at their posters. Their fears about the132

Scientific Poster Presentations, OnCUE Journal, 11(2), pages 131-140

visitors are related to speed of speaking and understanding grammatical structure.
They feel unable to produce sufficient responses or descriptions of their work
because of their lack of vocabulary and grammar.
English teachers rarely have the chance to assist in designing such posters,
but when they do, the problems are typical:• Too much text information or almost none except figure captions• Figures are too small• Too numerous tables and figures• Cute clip art used instead of professional figures• Irregular layout leading to unclear flow of information• Improper grammar and sentence structure

Poster Planning Lessons

The graduate school course English Communication for Science (ECS) has
weekly 90-minute lessons. While the native teachers follow a similar syllabus,
lesson plans differ. This paper will describe only the author’s course section andhow it is taught to provide students with experience using spoken and written
English on a scientific poster. Overall, the lesson plans include the following:• making a Powerpoint presentation• writing business documents (resume, self-invitation to labs, application
letter for internships, professional bio)
• taking weekly academic vocabulary quizzes• making & presenting a science-based poster
A series of lessons is proposed to gradually instill speaking confidence
and poster layout know-how. Two lessons are dedicated to showing students
organizational poster formatting. Classroom discussions are conducted insmall groups to trigger current knowledge about differences in posters andslideshow presentations. In class they collectively evaluate a bad poster (http://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design/bad), and they critique actual research
posters from their lab units to see what mistakes to avoid and strengths tomimic. A mock poster template allows them to talk about a hobby and to think
about potential questions to ask. This exercise is sometimes extended for one
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more lesson by a longer “pecha kucha” presentation in triads; pecha kucha is aslideshow methodology which displays simplified slides automatically on a timer
instead of allowing the presenter to control them (http://www.pechakucha.
org/). It was implemented in this course to encourage students to think strongly
about timing (i.e., lack of delays in speaking) and making slides with little text.
The two audience members watch the laptop computer slideshow and speaker,
then provide immediate feedback orally. All of these lessons build to the final
poster presentation.
Another unique lesson begins earlier in the semester. “Lab news chats” areconducted in every lesson to focus on explaining scientific activities in their labs,
such as reading or finding journals, learning new techniques, making mistakes
in analysis or experimentation, preparing for a conference, taking measurements.
Chats about casual topics (even lab dinner parties) are forbidden. Students
are randomly assigned a partner who may or may not have the same major, sothey practice how to simplify technical terms and how to interrupt a speakerfor various reasons. The pair speaks for a total of 6-7 minutes then switch to a
new partner at least once to repeat the activity. The teacher monitors language
weaknesses and gives individual advice. Since the idea is to teach simplificationof terms, the teacher does not have to know the actual science. After one or two
rotations, larger groups sit and discuss their weaknesses then announce themto the class so the teacher can provide instruction to the entire class on how to
overcome them. The entire lab news chat uses about one third of the class period,so there is time for other lessons that day.
Relative clauses are taught because they are a common way to explain
unfamiliar things, but they are also a difficult grammatical point for thesestudents. Lessons begin by asking students to assign a “category” to a familiar
object (usually something traditionally Japanese such at a kimono or chopsticks),
and then add the “that” clauses which provide more descriptive information.
The second half of the lesson involves writing tasks to describe general scientificitems with relative clauses, and homework focuses on student choices of
specific materials in their lab as the items to describe. For example, “In my lab
I use ELISA. That is an analysis technique that measures very small amounts of134

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chemicals.”
The topic for each student’s poster was to describe their unit laboratory, its
research goals and some data, the members, and main advisor. If the unit has
specialized equipment or software, the poster includes it. All of this information
has at some prior time been discussed during the Lab News Chat activities.
A week prior to presentation day, students with the same major brainstorm
potential vocabulary that they share from their unit labs. Everyone receives
a mock poster to show them how to display information on their unit’s goals,members, machinery, and data. Each student is provided with an A0 size sheetof poster paper, on which they could write by hand or affix typed material.
Two reference books with English and Japanese instructions were available tohelp with poster planning (Langham, 2007) and science conversation (Kato &Cohen, 2004).

Poster Presentation Day

Half the students hung their posters around the classroom. The other half visited
a poster from a different science unit for three minutes with one visitor per
poster. Presenters were expected to talk but also take questions. Visitors then had
1-2 minutes to complete a feedback form (Appendix A) submitted to the teacher.
Subsequently, visitors rotated to two more posters, thus affording presenters withthe opportunity to deliver their poster a total of three times. When this session
ended, the visitors changed places with the presenters to show their own posters.
Feedback forms were examined by the teacher and returned to presenterswith the visitors’ names removed. Peer feedback has been found useful forstudents making presentations (Topping, 1998; Otoshi & Heffernen, 2008;
Girard, Pinar, & Trapp, 2011). Pictures of each poster were taken by the teacher,and they were graded according to a rubric (Appendix B).

Grading

Teacher scores have been consistent over the years that this project has been used
(Table 1). The average score is 7.278 out of 10 points, with a range of 4 to 10 anda median score of 7.5.
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Table 1.
Average Scores of Posters
2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

7.15

8.00

6.68

7.73

6.83

Despite some posters being designed on Microsoft Word, there are still
spelling and grammar mistakes that should have been discovered with spell
checker and grammar checker. A fair number of posters either have too littleinformation (with huge font or handwriting size) or too small font, so they are
not always able to remember their previous lessons about weak points to avoid.
As Endo (2015) pointed out, it may take more than one poster project to get
across the various ideas of proper format design. Nevertheless, students who havetaken this course show better quality posters than those prior to this course’sinception.

Project Evaluation

Time constraints imposed by the syllabus content and by the students’ research
activities prevented them from practicing their final posters or borrowing thereference books, but every year many report enjoying this activity as useful. Lab
news chats were also very popular despite their difficulties in learning to interrupt
and simplify scientific terminology. During the poster presentations, students
recognized these weaknesses, whether they spoke to students in the same ordifferent field. However, they admitted that repeated presentations improved
their speed and amount of material that they could convey to the visitors, which
supports earlier observations (Nagasaki, 2007). Student feedback appearedhonest and accurate. Giving students a chance to see and judge authentic posters
from their older colleagues as part of earlier homework provided a foundation
for any posters they would have to design in the future. Students pointed out thatpractical nature of the chats and posters as they relate to their professions, so thisproject and its support lessons fulfilled some of the goals of the course design.

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Alternative Poster Concepts

With no research data in their first year (and first semester) of research, graduate
students can still make a poster to describe something scientific: their department’s
research and techniques. Other researchers have reported different ways to selecttopics, such as designing experiments to be performed (Cullen & Pudwill, 2003;Rajagopalan, 2015) or conducting class surveys (Brown, Glick, Holst, & Tomei,1997). Cullen and Pudwill (2003) also spent one day prior to poster presentations
to allow a warm-up presentation with worksheets to complete as visitors. An
alternative topic could have come from their undergraduate research; however,students in this course were deemed too weak in English to handle that.

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful to David Campbell, who offered advice and shared ideas
through the years on how to design elements of this project.

References

Boggu, A. T., & Singh, J. S. (2015). Poster presentation as an effective
communication tool in an EFL context. International Journal of Language
and Linguistics, 2(5), 203-213.
Brown, C., Glick, C., Holst, M., & Tomei, J. (1997). Project work in theJapanese language classroom. JALT Hokkaido Chapter 1997 conference
proceedings. Sapporo, Japan: JALT Hokkaido.
Cameron, C., Chang, S., & Pagel, W. (2011). Scientific English: A programfor addressing linguistic barriers of international research trainees in theUnited States. Journal of Cancer Education, 26, 72-78.
Cullen, B., & Pudwill, L. (2003). Presentations in the technical English
classroom. JALT2002 conference proceedings. Tokyo, Japan: JALT.
Endo, J. (2015). Proposal for research presentation poster design workshop.
Visual Literacy Today. Retrieved from http://visualliteracytoday.org/
proposal-for-research-presentation-poster-design-workshop-by-junichiendo/
Girard, T., Pinar, M., & Trapp, P. (2011). An exploratory study of class137

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presentations and peer evaluations: Do students perceive the benefits?
Academy of Educational Leadership Journal, 15(1), 77-94.
Kato, S., & Cohen, M. (2004). Bio kenkyuu rabo eikaiwa [Bioscience laboratory
English conversation]. Tokyo, Japan: Yodosha.
Langham, C. S. (2007). Kokusai gakkai ingurisshu [English for oral and poster
presentations]. Tokyo, Japan: Ishiyaku Publishers.
Nagasaki, M. (2007). Communication through a poster presentation task. InK. Bradford-Watts (Ed.), JALT2006 conference proceedings. Tokyo, Japan:JALT.
Otoshi, J., & Heffernen, N. (2008). Factors predicting effective oralpresentations in EFL classrooms. The Asian EFL Journal, 10(1), 65-78.
Rajagopalan, U. M. (2015). Critical reflection on teaching of poster to Japanesetechnical university students. Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposiumon Innovative Teaching and Research in ESP. Tokyo, Japan: The Universityof Electro-Communications.
Tardy, C. (2004). The role of English in scientific communication: Lingua
franca or Tyrannosaurus rex? Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 3,247-269.
Topping, K. (1998). Peer assessment between students in colleges anduniversities. Review of Educational Research, 68(3), 249-276.

Author bio

Glen Hill is an associate professor at Obihiro University of Agriculture andVeterinary Medicine, where he teaches undergraduate courses reading skills andtechnical writing, as well as the graduate school course English for Communicationin Science. He has a strong interest in teaching English to science majors. hill@obihiro.ac.jp
Received: September 30, 2017
Accepted: July 15, 2018138

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Appendix A
Appendix A

StudentFeedback Scores for Poster Presentations
Student Feedback Scores for Poster Presentations
Poster presenter’s name ___________________________________________How easy is it to see these items from 2 meters away?
Title ___ Easy___ A little difficult___ Too difficult___ This was not on the poster
Student and department name___ Easy___ A little difficult___ Too difficult___ This was not on the poster
Headings___ Easy___ A little difficult___ Too difficult___ This was not on the poster
How is the contrast of text color and background color?
____ Good ____ so-so ____ Poor
In your opinion, how much writing (text) is on the poster?
____ It’s enough but not too much. ____ A little too much ____ Too much writing
How is the layout of the poster items?
How was font type and size?
____ Easy to understand and follow____ font was good____ A little difficult to understand and follow____ font was so-so____ Too difficult to understand and follow____ font was not very good
Did the poster have any information that was NOT needed?
____ no, it was all needed ____ yes, a little was not needed
PRESENTER’S EXPLANATION and SPEAKING ABILITY
How well did the poster explain their poster in English?
____ very clearly____ clearly, but some problems____ I understood only a little____ unclear
GENERAL SCORECOMMENTS?

(1= very good, 10=poor) ________139____ yes, a lot was not neededHillAppendix B
Teacher Scores for Poster Presentations
10 points per poster:
1 pt Full student name
1 pt Interesting title, not just name of laboratory unit?
1 pt Font size (or handwriting size) ok?
2 pt Layout easy to understand flow, neatly organized?
1 pt Figures/tables/pics suitable size?
2 pt Spelling and grammar
2 pt Content about lab describes all members & prof, not just you?
(includes necessary figure captions/explanations)[comments about strong and weak points in detail, plus copy of poster photo]140