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English Language Support: Presenting with confidence

Presenting with confidence

For your presentation to be successful you need to engage your audience.  To do this your presentation needs to be well organised, easy to follow and most importantly delivered naturally.  In Presenting with confidence, we will first focus on how to create a coherent and accurate presentation before moving on to look at the key features of pronunciation to help you engage your audience.

 

Important Information

  • Presenting with confidence  is a short course consisting of 4 sessions.
  • Each session is 90 minutes long.
  • The course runs for 4 weeks.
  • There are regular start dates each month.

Scroll down to find more information about each session and its learning outcomes.

Next course starts

1 - Transforming the written word to the spoken word

Changing your academic writing into a presentation is challenging for any student. It's important when preparing your presentation you don't write an essay and then simply read this out to your audience. This workshop will help you with key strategies to ensure your presentation is a success.

In this session, you will:

  • read an authentic academic text and identify the key points to include in a short presentation.
  • practise verbally summarising a paragraph.
  • learn how to verbally reference an academic source.

2 - Planning your presentation – structure and cohesion

A successful presentation is always well organised and coherent. This workshop will help you develop the language needed to shape an effective presentation with an engaging start, a clear and progressive middle, and a strong ending. We will cover general discourse markers, sequencing devices and transitional language usage: the key functional language needed for a successful presentation.

In this session, you will:

  • become more aware of how to sequence and logically order an academic presentation.
  • use key transitional markers in a presentation with effective stress and intonation.
  • learn new vocabulary and expressions associated with presenting.

3 - Highlighting data and diagrams in a presentation

Presentations often require you to describe graphs and charts. Your audience can lose interest if there is too much detail, so it's important you summarise and highlight key data. This workshop will focus on developing your ability to accurately describe quantities and changes in your presentation using a range of words and phrases

In this session, you will:

  • practise adjective/noun and adverb/verb phrases to illustrate changes.
  • be more confident using quantifiers to summarise.
  • learn phrases to highlight key information in your presentation.

4 - Speaking clearly and effectively

It's not just what you say - it's how you say it. Presentations need to be delivered in a way that engages your audience and helps them follow what you are saying. In this workshop we will work on your speed, accurate word stress and natural intonation patterns to help you successfully deliver your presentation.

In this session, you will:

  • practise using appropriate stress patterns in words and sentences.
  • use intonation patterns to convey meaning.
  • become more aware of word chunking in connected speech.