Audiences love statistics. Statistics are relatively easy for your students to fi nd and include in their presentations. But the problem that I fi nd is that students don't know when and how to use them.
Students often mention numbers in the presentations, but often without giving the audience the means to understand what these numbers mean. In addition, students don't necessarily know from a set of numbers which are the best to give an audience.
To learn about this, see 6.7 , 6.8 and 12.9 in English for Presentations at International Conferences .
Let's imagine you are British and a student asks you about the Royal Family and how many Brits would actually prefer to have a republic. You could say 'quite a lot of people would like to get rid of the royal family', which - being so vague - would give them no real information at all. Or you could give them an exact fi gure "8.2 million would rather have a republic". Another Brit would be able to make sense of that statistic and decide if it is a high number or a small number. But, if you're not a Brit, you will obviously need to have more information, principally the number of people who could vote on such an issue (around 45.6 million people).
But if you tell your class that around 18% of the population would vote to abolish the Royal Family, you are giving a much clearer picture.
Yet, even that 18% could be made much more interesting by telling your students that the percentage was the same in 1969, in 1993, in 2002, in 2011 etc. … basically, it doesn't seem to change.
However, you might be able to make the statistic even clearer if you compared how many citizens in other countries that have a monarchy would like to abolish it.
I suggest you fi nd an area that will interest most of your students and get them to come up with their own statistics about it. This area could be: a local monument,
a building (museum, art gallery, sports hall, concert hall), a car / plane / train etc., a famous person, and so on.
Below is a possible procedure:
1. As a whole class, decide (preferably) on one item (for instance, I live and work in Pisa, so my choice could be the Leaning Tower).
2. In small groups, get them to choose what they think are fi ve interesting facts and statistics about their item.
3. Get feedback from each group and write up their facts and statistics on the whiteboard.
4. As a whole class, decide what the top fi ve most interesting statistics are.
5. Now get students to imagine that they have to compare their item with a simi- lar item in order to provide more context for an audience (in my case, the obvious choice is the Eiffel Tower in Paris).
6. Finally, get them to think of the best format for comparing their two items (graph, table, images etc.).
There are various useful outcomes of this exercise.
1) there is a difference between what students (and presenters in gen- eral) think an audience will / should be interested in, and what an audience really is interested in. For instance, in their small groups (Step 2 above), many of my students decided that the name of the architect who designed the Leaning Tower was important for the audience to know and the fact that it has 294 steps and is only 55.86 m tall. But in Step 4, when choosing the top fi ve statistics, the number of suicides from the top of the tower was deemed to be far more interesting than knowing the name of the architect.
2) giving numbers alone doesn't help the audience What does a height of only 55.86 m tall mean? It means nothing unless you compare it to, for instance, the Eiffel Tower at 320 m.
3) the means of presenting information is key to raising audience inter- est . If I tell you that the Eiffel Tower weighs 10,000 tons, that doesn't tell you much. But what if I get you to guess which is the heaviest (we know which is the tallest) between the Pisa and Paris towers, you might be surprised then to learn that the Eiffel Tower weighs around one third less than the Leaning Tower despite being six times taller. So actually asking the audience questions and getting them to guess might be better than simply giving them information in a table.
Giving audience surprising or counterintuitive information also works well:
• there are actually three leaning towers in Pisa
• the Eiffel tower grows in height by 15 cm in summer
• the lift cables at the Eiffel Tower were cut when Hitler visited so he had to walk up the 1665 steps
• it costs about 10 euros more to go up the tower in Pisa than in Paris
And this last point can give rise to a class discussion on the value and appropriate- ness of quirky information at an international conference. This then leads into a discussion of what the purpose of a presentation is. Is it to impart new information to the scientifi c community, thereby advancing the state of the art? Or is it actually more important to leave a lasting impression on the audience so that they will be inspired to read your paper, contact you, and wish to collaborate with you? And can these objectives not be facilitated by providing both an informative and entertaining presentation?
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© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
A. Wallwork, English for Academic Research: A Guide for Teachers, English for Academic Research, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32687-0_13
Working on Students' Pronunciation