Creating presentable PowerPoint presentations (including reference to students with dyslexia or who do not have English as their first language)

This guide aims to enlighten presenters in the art of effective visual presentations to enable the audience to view the presentation as an enhancement rather than a substitution

Sounding natural: improving oral presentation skills

This paper discusses how multimodal resources can be used to teach oral communication strategies, as exemplified in a course taught at the University of Padua, Italy. The course focused on lexicon and language structures in use, pronunciation and intonation, body language and cultural awareness. A variety of multimedia resources were used, including: pictures and illustrations; digital slides; audio files for pronunciation exercises and for audio-video feedback with the speech analysis software Praat; video clips from online English courses and other YouTube videos of authentic interviews, talk shows, news, monologues, and presentations. The main class activities were: listening and watching video clips; metalinguistic discussions on the use of verbal and non-verbal language in different linguistic situations; pronunciation practice; and speaking. Students were filmed while speaking and received feedback on their oral and communicative skills. Overall, the course appeared to be highly effective in raising students’ awareness of facts about English communication and its workings

Multimodal enactment of characters in conference presentations

In academic oral genres such as conference presentations, speakers resort to more than words to convey meaning. Research also suggests that persuasion, an important element of the communicative purpose of conference presentations, is frequently achieved through a combination of semiotic modes. Therefore, a skilful orchestration of these modes can be considered key to achieving effective communication in this genre. However, our understanding of persuasion has often focused on specific elements of the message considered in isolation and mainly from the linguistic perspective. Relatively little attention has been paid to the overall persuasive effect achieved by the complex multimodal ensemble. This study approaches the analysis of persuasive strategies in conference presentations combining multimodal discourse analysis and ethnographic methods. It focuses on a particular attention-getting technique: enactment of characters, or acting the part of a person that is being referred to. Our analysis shows how it is achieved through the orchestration of different modes such as words, intonation, gestures, head movements, gaze and facial expression

Poster Presentation as A Tool to Assess Students’ Academic Speaking Performance: Teachers and Students’ Perspectives

A poster presentation is a way that is done to share or inform a research data and information in oral communication. Through poster presentation, the presenters will be able to present the data easily. In education, poster presentation is always used for the research seminar and the conference. For the English-speaking students, they use a poster presentation as a project to learn English and how they can use English as the academic speaker. This is the reason why the Academic Speaking classes at an English Language Education Program (ELEP), in a private university in Central Java, Indonesia used the poster presentation as the final project to assess students’ performance. The study was conducted at the Faculty of Language and Arts, at a private university in Central Java, Indonesia.  The aim of the study is to see how the teachers and students’ perceptions about the use of poster presentation and how it can increase the students’ academic speaking performance. The research participants were two of Academic Speaking class' lecturers and two students of batch 2016. They were interviewed using an audio recording and also the interview protocol. Based on the interview, there are some different opinions about the use of poster presentation in Academic Speaking class. Overall, the results found that the use of poster presentation, which is a form of speaking skill assessment, could increase the students’ academic speaking performance such as eye contact, gesture, fluency, pronunciation, vocabulary, and knowledge

ALANZ handbook 2018

Co-edited Handbook for participants at December ALANZ Symposiu

ALANZ 2018

1st December 2018 Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec) Hamilton We are pleased to announce that the Call for Papers for the ALANZ SYMPOSIUM 2018 is now open. We invite proposals for paper presentations, interactive sessions and posters. The landscape of English language teaching is constantly changing and as teachers contemplate new cohorts of learners, they face this question: Is business as usual enough? In today’s settings there are new technologies to incorporate into learning and teaching, different teaching spaces becoming available, a need to balance fostering learner autonomy with the pastoral care of students, as well as ensuring that our teaching is relevant to the world our students face. We would like to adopt a collegial approach to this question and so invite abstracts from members and non-members of ALANZ and in particular from new and emerging researchers. Presentation types: * Oral Presentations: These will be allocated 20 minutes and 5 minutes for questions (25 minutes total) usually supported with visual aids. * Interactive sessions: These could be workshops or informal discussions around points of interest in Applied Linguistics (45 minutes) and could be supported by visual aids or activities. * Posters: Often some research projects can be best presented in a visual manner in the form of a poster. Abstracts (250 words max.) can be submitted to one of two committee members: * Anthea Fester email: [email protected] or * Celine Kearney email: [email protected] Deadline for abstract submission: 7th September 2018 Notification of acceptance: 28th September 201

Designing Sugaropolis:digital games as a medium for conveying transnational narratives

In this paper, the authors present a case study of ‘Sugaropolis’: a two-year practice-based project that involved interdisciplinary co-design and stakeholder evaluation of two digital game prototypes. Drawing on the diverse expertise of the research team (game design and development, human geography, and transnational narratives), the paper aims to contribute to debates about the use of digital games as a medium for representing the past. With an emphasis on design-as-research, we consider how digital games can be (co-)designed to communicate complex histories and geographies in which people, objects, and resources are connected through space and time