ELT in Brazil

Today I taught another lesson to a pair of students who want to learn English to better communicate in the business context. We had a needs analysis interview before starting the course and both students mentioned they’d like to be better at giving presentations and responding to questions in Q&A sessions after these presentations.

I thought it would be interesting to use this second class of ours to assess their presentation skills and also get to know their work a bit better so I can design more contextualized lessons in the future.

We began the lesson by talking about what makes a good presentation. We discussed for a couple of minutes, wrote a set of criteria, and agreed that these were relevant for most work presentations.

Then, I used a pop-up presentation task. I created the template below and shared it with them. Click here to see it. If you click on FILE and then MAKE A COPY you and your students will be able to edit it.

I allowed the students some time to create their slides, highlighting the focus on the presentation and not really on making the slides look nice – the template helps a lot with that. I usually ask my students to turn their cameras off while they’re working on something individually and then turn them back on when they are done so I know they’re ready.

When both students were done, I asked one of them to present and talk about what they do at work and why they think it is important. At the end, we had a Q&A session in which the other student and I asked questions. We worked on some emergent language and I gave them feedback. We repeated this process with the other student and the lesson ended there.

If I had more time I would have asked students to present again with the feedback in mind and have them give each other feedback on their sessions.

This lesson gave me some insights on what to work on in the future. For the next lesson, we are going to watch a short work presentation taken from YouTube and assess it based on the criteria we created. I hope this will generate some discussion and some implicit language learning.

What do you think of this lesson? Would you use it with your learners?