How to ace your oral presentations? / Sheela Paramasivam

Oral presentations have become a major aspect of on-going assessments in many universities as part of the subject assessment in the curriculum. A course may have three to four assessments comprising individual tests, pair work and group work. Of these, oral presentation is seen as a mode to assess students' understanding of the subject matter. Many students fear oral presentations, as having to speak in front of the class, addressing their peers within the stipulated time gives them the jitters. This is further compounded by a lack of confidence in speaking the target language, especially English (Rahmat et al., 2022). A survey of my own class students indicates that they are not comfortable with oral presentations, especially if it is done in English. Some reasons quoted are lack of confidence, shyness to speak in front of peers as well as being scared they will forget the contents. In my experience assessing students, I notice many students have started to rely on their handphones to present. They read from the slides on their handphones! Is this because they lack confidence or have not practised for their presentation earlier? This could also perhaps be because it is last-minute work, and having no time to practice, they read from their PowerPoint slides in their handphones or the LCD projector. Some students prepare beautiful and colourful slides, only to read from it. Students fail to understand that this is a presentation and not a reading exercise, although they have been reminded of these umpteen times by their lecturers. The poor performance in oral presentations needs to be addressed as it seems that students just want to finish and get over their presentations as soon as possible and move on to other areas of their assignments and assessments. So as lecturers, we need to guide and teach our students to become good presenters, to know the importance of delivering good presentations and not turn the oral presentation into a reading exercise.