日本大学歯学部紀要 35，57‑63，2007

Using guest lectures and micro‑presentations to teach oral presentation skills
Clive Langham
Abstract
This paper describes an approach to teaching oral presentation skills using guest lectures
as a model for novice presenters. It also explains how to use micro‑presentations in an oralpresentation skills program as a way of practicing target structures and giving students
maximum opportunity to improve their listening and speaking skills.
Key words: oral presentation skills, spoken academic discourse

Introduction
For science students at undergraduate and graduate level,as well as for scientists at research
institutes,universities and private companies,the need to comprehend and deliver oral presentations in English is fast becoming an essential skill. The reason for this can be traced to therapid increase in the number of international conferences taking place around the world and theincreasingly important role that such events play in communication between members of aparticular discourse community. This is particularly true for the medical profession. Webber2005 informs us that,In the medical profession,besides reading,the ability to follow oral communication of research is also very important because international conferences
are an essential part of the communication network within the scientificdiscourse community.
It is interesting to note that at the same time as the rapid increase in the importance of oralpresentations,there has been considerable interest in spoken academic discourse which is now
reported as being a field in its own right (Fortanet 2004). This development has meant that
research into what actually happens in oral and also poster presentations has produced resultsthat are of use to course designers, textbook writers and teachers involved in teachingpresentation skills programs. In this context,however,it should be remembered that researchon spoken academic discourse still lags behind its written counterpart (Crawford Camiciottoli2004).This can be explained bythe added prestige traditionallyafforded to reading and writing.
Additionally,there are practical reasons for the neglect of spoken academic discourse,notably
日本大学歯学部 英語
日本大学歯学部総合歯学研究所歯学教育研究部門〒 101‑8310 東京都千代田区神田駿河台１‑８‑13(受理：2007年９月 26日）

Nihon University School of Dentistry
Division of Dental Education, Dental Research Center,
Nihon University School of Dentistry
1‑8‑13 Kanda‑Surugadai, Chiyoda‑ku, Tokyo 101‑8310, Japan

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日本大学歯学部紀要 35，57‑63，2007

the fact that accessing and transcribing spoken data is a complex,expensive and time‑consuming activity that not all researchers in the field can readily undertake for a number of practicalreasons.
Another significant development is the recent rapid increase in the number of programs that
focus on the teaching of presentation skills. At most universities, institutes and private companies,such programs are offered to assist research staff and students to improve their skills,
and thus more effectivelydisseminate their research data.Also,the number of textbooks aimed
at teaching presentation skills has risen rapidly over the past few years.It is likely,however,that teachers of presentations skills will not be completely satisfied with commercially available textbooks. This is mainly because they are of a general nature and do not match specifically the fields and needs of their students. The result is that teachers feel the need tosupplement their classes with materials and activities that will more effectively help theirstudents improve their presentation skills.The approach and activities described in this paper
grew out of the authorʼs own quest for better teaching materials and an improved curriculum.

Guest lectures
The teaching activities described in this paper require access to scientific oral presentations
given by experienced presenters who are either native or non‑native speakers. For mostinstitutions,such as universities and research institutes,a good source of such presentations isguest lectures. It is becoming increasingly common, particularly in the light of increased
globalization of research communities,for special lectures to be given on a fairly regular basis
by visiting researchers and others invited to speak on a particular topic for the benefit of staff
and students.Very often such events are only publicized within the departments involved and,while not being actively discouraged, visits by members of staff from other departments are
something of a rarity.This is a reflection of the lack of communication between departments.
It is also very rare for English departments in such institutions to have anything to do withguest lectures. For the most part, English classes are conducted in isolation from science
departments and although there is a great potential for cooperation and improved course
design, this is very largely overlooked.
At Nihon University School of Dentistry,a casual glance at the many bulletin boards dottedaround campus reveals that on average there are in excess of ten guest lectures a year on
campus on a variety of scientific topics that are open to anyone.In 2005,for the first time,theEnglish Department at NUSD approached a number of science departments involved in hostingguest lectures with a view to getting permission to attend and record electronically those
lectures. Department heads and individual presenters were very generous with their time andalso supportive.Permission to record presentations was granted byindividual presenters and in
most cases a lasting relationship with the members of the departments concerned was started.

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Using guest lectures and micro‑presentations to teach oral presentation skills

How can guest lectures be used in an oral presentation skills program?
As I have alreadypointed out,textbooks that are meant to develop presentation skills are too
general to be of much use and do not match the needs of students in science programs. They
are predominantly aimed at teaching the genre of the business presentation which has structureand norms that are somewhat different from those of the scientific oral presentation. Guest
lectures,however,in the field of the students in the program offer several advantages and canbe readily used to supplement existing materials. Firstly, the subject matter is familiar to thestudents, representing information from a community they are keen to join. Secondly, such
lectures offer good examples of the norms of the discourse community that students wish tojoin and,accordingly,can be used as a model.Thirdly,the fact that they areʻ
liveʼand given byoutside experts significantly increases their impact,making them a kind of benchmark against
which students can measure their ability to comprehend academic scientific presentations.
One problem often encountered in Japan when teaching presentation skills is that students
lack good listening skills. This is the result of the focus in high schools here on reading andwriting skills at the expense of oral/aural skills. Poor listening skills represent a significant
barrier to people who want to become members of a discourse community and actively
exchange information with people in the same field,either by giving or attending oral or poster
presentations. An effective presentation skills program has to address this problem.
Letʼs consider how using guest lectures can help students to improve their listening skills.It
is probable that most students who simply attend a guest lecture will have listening problems
arising from unknown vocabulary and expressions,as well as the speed at which the presentation is delivered. The volume of material, and the question and answer session after thepresentation will also present significant problems. All of the above will pose significant
barriers to communication.The key to overcoming these problems is to take a recording of thelecture and make this available to students for further study both in class and outside.This canbe achieved by using a simple IC recorder or basic tape recorder to record the presentation.
With this method quite good quality recordings can be obtained that can be transferred onto a
computer and then to CDʼs readyfor distribution to students.In this way,each student can havea personal copy of the lecture that can be used to improve listening skills either in class or athome. Teachers can assign students to transcribe particular parts of the presentation,say forexample, the introduction, a complete section from the main body, the language used to
introduce a visual, or what is said in the conclusion section of the presentation. Students cancompare their transcriptions with others in the group, and finally should be encouraged tocheck them against a copy provided by the teacher. The next step is to highlight usefulsentences that students can use in their own presentations. For the most part, sentences thatstudents focus on are those that indicate organization within the presentation. This text
structuring aspect of scientific presentations is known as metadiscourse. The function of59日本大学歯学部紀要 35，57‑63，2007

metadiscourse is to guide the audience through a speech event by helping them create a mental
map. In other words, presenters inform their audience of what is about to come and how thisconnects to what has been said and will be said.Here are some examples of sentences used in
the organization of an introduction.
This is a transcribed introduction from a guest lecture given in the Department of Pharmacology.Students focused on words and phrases that helped in the organization of the presentation
and which they wanted to use in their own presentations. Verbs are in italics, rhetoricalquestions in bold and sequencers in parentheses.
Today,Iʼ
d like to talk about a new concept which might be very helpful in the
future for treating Parkinsonʼ
s disease.Iʼm going to divide my talk into fivemain parts. (In the first part), Iʼd like to say something about Parkinsonʼsdisease itself. What is the disease? How is it caused? And,how do we treat
it today? (In the second part), Iʼm going to explain the concept of atypical
Parkinson compounds. And then Iʼ
ll go on to (the third part) to discuss theeffects of a prototype.(In part four),Iʼ
ll consider the best model of Parkinsonʼ
s disease. (In the last part), I want to focus on possible sites of action in thebrain. Okay, let me start with Parkinsonʼ
s disease.
I have already considered the problems that Japanese novice presenters have in listening tospoken English.These can be tackled byusing the techniques introduced above.Another related
problem is lack of speaking ability.Again,this stems from the focus in high schools in Japan,
which is almost never on spoken English. Students in presentation skills programs will sometimes try to compensate for their lack of ability in speaking by simply memorizing theirpresentations. In graduate school in Japan, this appears to be a common strategy. Given the
difficulty of the task and the lack of adequate training,it is quite understandable that students
should fall back on memorization. Adoption of such a strategy means,however,that students
work from which is essentially a written text, developing a very rigid presentation style thatis formal and resembles more closely a written paper than an oral presentation.This is a stylethat does not readily conform to what is generally seen at international conferences, whereexperienced presenters speak from notes or extemporaneously.

Using micro‑presentations to develop speaking skills and provide ample opportunity for practice
The question is how can we overcome the problem of poor speaking skills and over‑relianceon a script? One option is the use of micro‑presentations. What are micro‑presentations?
Basically,they are short presentations or parts of presentations of between 3 to 10 minutes inlength done in groups of two to four students. Students are divided into groups of the above
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Using guest lectures and micro‑presentations to teach oral presentation skills

numbers and assigned to an area of the lecture room for their micro‑presentations.If students
can have access to a whiteboard, or even poster paper that can be pinned to the wall in thatarea, this will encourage them to illustrate their micro‑presentations with examples of actual
data,experimental setups and so on.Students can be assigned to give micro‑presentations thatinvolve for example the introduction, a single section, graphic or conclusion from a presentation they are working on or have given in the past. Letʼs look at an example of how students
might practice introducing a graphic. I know from my own experience of watching presentations that most novice Japanese presenters have a single rather dull way of introducing
graphics, generally taught in graduate school, which is as follows: This slide shows＋explanation of data/main point. There is nothing wrong with this sentence and it is commonly foundin presentations, but the problem is that students overuse it and have no other ways of
introducing a graphic.This makes for a very repetitive presentation which also does not reflect
what actually happens in real presentations. Data that I have collected from various guest
lectures suggests that it is becoming increasingly common to introduce at least some graphics
in a presentation in a three stage system which works like this. In stage one, the presenter
introduces the general topic of the slide,and this is done just prior to the slide appearing on thescreen. This is formulated by the following sentence.Iʼm going to show you a slide with somedata from our most recent experiment.The intention here is to signal to the audience the themeof the slide and the type of information to come.The second stage of the system is quite simple
and uses the word ʻ
hereʼto introduce relevant information in the slide.For example: Here,wehave temperature plotted against time. Or, Here, we have rates of heart disease in relation to
occupation and age. In the third stage, the presenter focuses on the important information in
the slide using phrases such as, Iʼd like to stress that ＋ (main point) or ʻIʼ
d like to draw yourattention to ＋ (main point).
In micro‑presentations, students can prepare a set of graphics representing data from theirresearch and practice presenting them with the kind of language used above.Such graphics canbe simply drawn on a whiteboard or on poster paper. There is no need to make use of power
point in this kind of activity.After explaining their graphics,the presenter should be ready totake questions from the other members of the micro‑presentation group. After the Q and A
session is over, the members of the group change roles and a new presenter stands up andpresents his or her graphics in the same way.This continues until everyone in the group has had
a turn. M eanwhile the teacher is circulating and monitoring the micro‑presentations that are
taking place simultaneously in the room.It is important for the teacher to take notes on things
like pronunciation,grammar problems and general presentation techniques.From time to time
it will be necessary to correct students,and to introduce new language as and when necessary.
The teacher can then close the micro‑presentations and ask students to return to their seats.
Following that, in a teacher‑fronted session lasting between 10 and 20 minutes, advice andfeedback can be given to the group as a whole, based on what the teacher has observed.This61

日本大学歯学部紀要 35，57‑63，2007

can cover both the weak and strong points of the micro‑presentations that have been given.The
same micro‑presentation procedure can be followed in subsequent classes to give students asmuch practice as possible.Teachers will continually have to remind students to incorporate thetarget structures derived from the recorded guest lectures into their micro‑presentations andultimately into their full scientific presentations of 15 to 20 minutes which they will practice inclass before they give them at an international conference.

Conclusion
The increased need to present data in English in international settings has resulted in moredemand for presentation skills courses that help novice members of the discourse community
work towards becoming fully‑fledged members of that community who can contribute to it,aswell as benefit from it. This paper has illustrated how using guest lectures can offer analternative to traditional course books and increase student motivation, interest and also
progress. The recorded presentations, transcriptions and handouts highlighting target structures derived from the guest lectures represent a model of language and techniques for students
to use in class in micro‑presentations and also in their future presentations at international
conferences.Using guest lectures also provides an important opportunity to create meaningful
links between science departments in the universityand the English department.This raises the
profile of the English department,and better communication between departments with seeminglyverydifferent goals means that improved presentation skills programs can be planned andimplemented involving members of both the science and English departments.
The frequent use of micro‑presentations allows students the time and space to practice thetarget language and specific parts of their presentations,such as introductions,moving between
sections,conclusions and so on.It also gives the opportunity to practice handling the Q and A
session,and allows the teacher to give feedback to students either as they practice or immediately after their presentation.This approach means that in each class students can get at least
10 to 15 minutes speaking time and ample opportunity to ask and answer questions.The above
suggests that micro‑presentations are a very powerful tool that can be used to good effect inpresentation skills programs.
Finally,for teachers interested in spoken academic discourse,and more specifically metadiscourse, the above approach to presentations represents an opportunity to conduct research inwhat is still a relativelyunder‑researched field.At the same time,increased knowledge of what
actually happens in presentations will help teachers to assist students in their quest to improvetheir presentation skills.
Another application of the above approach would be to investigate what happens in poster
sessions. Recording interactions at a real poster presentation would make it possible togeneralize about the kind of language and techniques used. These would be useful in theteaching of poster presentation skills programs by providing a possible model for both teachers
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Using guest lectures and micro‑presentations to teach oral presentation skills

and novice presenters.

Acknowledgment
I wish to thank Dr.A.R.Cools of Radbound University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, for hiskind permission to record and reproduce part of his lecture entitled : Are the target sites ofatypical antiparkinsonian drugs such as SKF 839 59 located outside or inside the striatal
structures? given at Nihon University School of Dentistry on October 16 2001.
References
Crawford Camiciottoli,B.(2004).Interactive discourse structuring in L2 guest lectures: Some insightsfrom a corpus‑based study. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3(1), 39 ‑54.
Fortanet,I.(2004).The use ofʻ
weʼin university in lectures: Reference and function.English for SpecificPurposes 23(1), 45‑66.
Webber, P. (2005). Interactive features in medical conference monologue.English for Specific Purposes24(2), 157‑181.

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