Unit 1-21. The use of ESP in business oral presentations

Section 1. Guidelines for reading texts on the use of international English in European business

A Swedish researcher Rebecca Hincks’ studyquantifies differences in slower speaking rates of Swedes in business meetings, and examines the effects of slower rates on the speaker’s ability to convey information. The participants of her experiment were fourteen fluent ESP speakers, Swedish student engineers, who held the same oral presentation twice, once in English and once in their native Swedish. The temporal variables of mean length of runs and speaking rate in syllables per second were calculated for each language. Speaking rate was found to be 23% slower when using English. The slower rate of speech was found to significantly reduce the information content of the presentations when speaking time was held constant. Her study study definitely dispels any misunderstanding that ESL speakers can manage to deliver the same amount of information despite their slower rate of speech in English. Therefore, training in rate perception and modification should be more rigorously incorporated into teacher training programs so that teachers can learn to slow down their speech when necessary.

Text 1-21. SPEAKING RATE AND INFORMATION CONTENT IN ENGLISH LINGUA FRANCA ORAL PRESENTATIONS

(Based on Rebecca Hincks’ study of oral presentations as a spoken genre)

Introduction

As English continues its growth as a lingua franca, more and more speakers across the world find themselves in front of an audience that needs to hear the speaker’s message in a language that neither speaker nor listener is entirely comfortable with. One reason for the discomfort can be traced to the extra time it takes to formulate one’s message in a second language (ESL). Slower English speakers in business meetings have inhibitions about taking the floor from native speakers, and both Swedish and international students may be frustrated by their ability to formulate responses quickly enough to contribute to classroom discussion (J. Jones, 1999). Though researchers have begun to explore the effect of L2 language use in interactive situations such as the meeting or the seminar, the ramifications of slower L2 speaking rates when holding an instructional monologue, such as a presentation or a lecture, have not been explored.

Understanding differences in speaking rate is important for many reasons, one of which is the changing linguistic situation in universities across Europe. By facilitating the movement of students between countries, the Bologna Process has instituted a dramatic increase of the use of L2 English in the university classroom (Wilkinson, 2004). For example, at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), the balance between native Swedish students and foreign students has changed greatly in recent years. As many as 70% of its Master’s programs are now being given in English to serve the needs of the growing numbers of students who don’t speak Swedish. More than 20% of the student engineers who participated were soon to leave the classroom and enter the lingua franca environment of Northern European industry, and were practicing one of the most critical and high-stakes tasks they would need to perform in their future careers.

For that reason, I believe, it is appropriate to use the term ‘English as a lingua franca’ regarding the study. Many of the university’s students come from outside Sweden. For teachers, this of course means a switch from teaching in one’s native language to teaching in a lingua franca medium. Neither teachers nor students are entirely satisfied with this new linguistic situation. Teachers complain that they lose spontaneity in their teaching; students complain about the quality of their teachers’ English.

English courses for teachers have been instituted at many northern European universities, but teachers often do not have time to attend them. The pedagogical implications for students of the shift to English-language instruction have also been studied. Klaassen (2001) concluded that, at least after the first year of instruction, a teacher’s pedagogical skill was more important than the language used. Airey & Linder (2006), on the other hand, found that when lectured in English, “students asked and answered fewer questions and reported being less able to follow the lecture and take notes at the same time,” (2006) even though the students themselves had not anticipated differences in the learning situation.

The cognitive demands of using a second language result in a slower rate of speech for most speakers. When time is limited, as it usually is when one is to deliver a lecture or an oral presentation, a slower rate of speech must affect the content of the lecture in one way or another. The best-case scenario would be a more concisely delivered L2 lecture; the worst-case scenario would be that important information was omitted for lack of time. The purpose of the research reported on in this paper was to first quantify differences in speaking rate when speakers hold presentations in their native language and in fluent English, and then to examine the effect of different speaking rates on the information content of the two presentations per speaker.

The present study

Temporal variables have thus been explored from the L1 perspective, the L2 perspective, and various interfaces between them. The present study is motivated by needs that could be described as pragmatic rather than theoretical. We are now in a situation, at least in Europe, where more speakers than ever before are carrying out their daily business in a second language, English. The fact that speakers speak more slowly in a second language may be obvious but it is not trivial in the globalizing world.

The question asked here is therefore how much are speakers slowed down?

Does the slower rate of speech mean that when time is limited, parts of an intended message may be left out?

This study has gathered data about the temporal characteristics of not only L2 but also L1 speech. This is not only necessary for the comparative nature of the study, but also because one goal of research into the temporal aspects of instructional speech could be to establish target speaking rates for lecturers and presenters.

Studies have shown that comprehension both for L1 and L2 users improves as rates slow. Native speakers in particular often need to learn to slow down their rate of speech, even when addressing other native speakers (Lynch, 1994). This can be difficult to achieve. Griffiths & Beretta found “no evidence of an intuitively shared feeling for a rate at which to pitch... deliveries” to student groups of varying ability in English (1991). Native-speaking teachers need to learn what speaking rates are appropriate.

Much temporal research has focused on laboratory speech samples, and the little work that has focused on naturally occurring speech has looked at the lectures of university professors, although not in a situation where the same lecture has been delivered in two languages. The genre that is examined in the present study, the oral presentation, differs from laboratory speech in a number of ways.

First of all, it can be said to be neither ‘read,’ nor ‘spontaneous’ but rather ‘guided’, ‘planned’ or ‘semi-spontaneous.’ Secondly, it reflects the kind of task that many people regularly meet, with a real communicative need and active listeners. Finally, the seven to ten minutes per speaker used in this study are longer speech samples than have been previously examined in the L2 temporal studies. Instead of mining a small amount of speech for a wide variety of features, the study focuses on the two variables, that have shown to be most salient in previous research.

Another difference from previous L2 studies is that the speakers in this study, though students, were relatively proficient speakers of English. They represent the upper ranges of English proficiency that can be encountered in northern Europe today, and northern European English speakers are generally seen to be at the forefront of proficiency in the lingua franca context (Erickson, 2004).

Using the Council of Europe (Europe, 2001) descriptors, the speakers would be placed in either the B2 or C1 categories regarding oral production.

The speakers should be seen as representatives of the types of people who need to use English on a daily basis to carry out their work, and who can be frustrated by the extra cognitive load that it entails, despite their skill in the language. The slower speaking rates in L2 that were found in the study should therefore be seen as potentially minimal differences; speaker groups generally less fluent than Swedes are likely to show even larger differences in speaking rate.

A possible objection to simply describing speakers in terms of their speaking rates is that such an approach cannot evaluate qualitative differences in the presentations. A competent speaker could theoretically still include the same basic content in an L2 presentation, even at a slower pace, by eliminating superfluous detail or repetition and being more direct.

Method, speech material and participants

The fourteen participants in the study, six women and eight men, were Master’s students of Engineering at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, taking an elective course in Technical English. All were native speakers of Swedish and had gone through the regular Swedish school system, which begins teaching English at an early age using communicative pedagogy. Young Swedish speakers of English have been shown to be among the best in Europe (Erickson, 2004). Their fluency is generally attributed not only to the success of school instruction, but also to other factors such as the use of subtitles rather than dubbing in foreign language television and films, the linguistic similarities between English and Swedish, and the motivation to learn a second language generated by being a native speaker of a relatively minor European language (Berg, Hult, & King, 2001).

The students were all roughly 24 years old and completing their third or fourth years of engineering studies in a variety of disciplines. They had taken a written diagnostic test upon application to the language department, and had been placed in either the upper intermediate (B2+) (10 subjects) or advanced classes (C1) (4 subjects). The oral presentations were recorded in the second half of the 56-hour courses, so that students had had plenty of time to warm up their spoken English. In addition, the four advanced students had previously held a shorter oral presentation for their classes. In summary, the subjects were fairly fluent speakers of English who can be seen as representative of many Europeans who need to use English regularly as part of their work. In the researcher’s opinion, their English was also perceptually on a par with many of their teachers at KTH.

Data collection

Instruction in presentation skills is an important component in the Technical English classes. The students practice what they have learnt by holding their own presentation and by analyzing other presentations in the form of written peer review comments. The presentation is to be about ten minutes in length though teachers generally do not enforce the time restrictions as strictly as is commonly done in conference settings. The topic for the presentation is up to the student but is to be of a basically technical nature.

All students but one used presentation software. Speaker 8 used overhead transparencies. None of the speakers used a manuscript. Teachers and classmates gave the students feedback on the class presentation.

During the two different terms when these subjects were studying English, they and many of their classmates allowed their classroom presentations to be audio recorded as part of a larger effort to collect a presentation corpus, presently consisting of about 100 recordings. All Swedish natives were also asked whether they would like to present their presentation again, this time in Swedish, for a small sum of money. Though many students expressed an initial willingness, scheduling difficulties and time pressures in the end narrowed down to a group of five students in Fall 2004, and nine students in Spring 2006. The students were told that they could use the same visual material as they had used for the English material and were assembled in small groups, so that an audience would be present to hear the presentation.

Audio recordings were made directly into a computer using a small clip-on microphone. Analysis was done using WaveSurfer (Sjölander & Beskow, 2000) to present the speech waveform and enable the measurement of pause length.

 

Transcription

The 28 presentations were carefully transcribed in a two-step process. First the entire presentation was orthographically transcribed, including filled pauses. Speech recognition was a helpful tool in the English transcriptions. The speaker-dependent dictation software Dragon NatSpeak 9 was trained to the researcher’s voice, who then repeated exactly what the speakers said into a microphone—a task that required concentration, but made the transcription process very efficient. A complete, though imperfect, transcription could be produced in real time – 10 minutes for a 10-minute presentation. Listening to the presentation two or three more times allowed for correction of the inaccuracies and addition of the filled pauses that the speech recognition is trained to ignore. The vocabulary of the dictation software was impressive, including Swedish place names and rare words such as types of pharmaceuticals and phenomena (e.g. quantum teleportation).

The second phase of transcription, which allowed further correction to any eventual inaccuracies, was to break the transcriptions into ‘runs’, using pauses as boundaries. The speech waveform was used to locate all silent or filled pauses longer than 250 milliseconds. A filled pause is not readily visible in the waveform, and so it was necessary to listen carefully and make run breaks for most of the filled pauses as well, unless they were extremely short ones. The run breaks appear as line breaks in the transcription, but the length of the pauses themselves was not collected as data.

Results

The main research issue addressed was an attempt to quantify the effect on speaking rate of using an L2 in the oral presentation situation. Using English instead of their native language meant that all speakers had shorter run lengths and slower rates of speech. On average, using English slowed the speakers down by 23%. When using a second language, the participants in this study, though they were speaking about material they themselves had prepared and were fluent speakers of English, show the degree to which operating in a second language affects the cognitive processes underlying speech production.

The transcripts reveal that a number of the speakers did not know how to express some concepts in Swedish, indicating that they had not thought through their presentations before coming to be recording. This discrepancy between the two presentation situations is mirrored in real-life: speakers who must work in a second language are likely to practice ahead of time to make sure that they have command of the vocabulary and expressions they must use to communicate. If these speakers had been better prepared for their L1 presentations, even larger differences between L1 and L2 would have been found, so these methodological imperfections should not negatively impact the validity of the results.

This study might dispel any illusions that L2 speakers can manage to deliver the same amount of information despite their slower rate of speech in an L2. When time was not controlled, there were some differences in information content, but they were not large, indicating that the speakers were proficient in English and well-prepared for their task. When time was kept constant, however, the slower speaking rate meant that information was left out. The study has used the idea unit as a unit of measurement adequate to establish quantifiable differences in content. However, there are other differences between the presentations that would be trickier to measure. One of these might be the use of metaphor or the frequency of adjectives, aspects that add important detail for the listeners. Another phenomenon revealed by the study is that of domain loss in the first language. Though several speakers at times had to search for terminology in Swedish, one speaker, S7, was at such a loss to explain an American road race in Swedish that the information content of his L1 presentation suffered.

Implications

Let us consider what would happen if the results of this study were extrapolated from a ten-minute presentation to a 45-minute lecture. If the rate of a delivery of a 45-minute lecture is slowed down by 25%, then the lecture will take closer to an hour to finish. If information is omitted from the L2 lecture at the same rates as were found in this study, then a 45-minute lecture could lack as much as 60 pieces of information that would have been mentioned in the lecturer’s first language. The challenges faced by L2 speakers extend beyond the classroom – other measures that could be considered to accommodate them could include variable speaker time at conferences and other gatherings.

The slow-down effect of 20-25% that was found in the study needs to be seen as a conservative estimate, given the facts that the students were relatively fluent speakers of English and had prepared and practiced for their English presentations. Faster lecturing is generally not better, far from it. While teachers using an L2 may be constrained by combinations of their own speaking style and their L2 proficiency, L1 teachers have at least the theoretical possibility of choosing a speaking rate that is appropriate for the audience and context. Yet, this can be extremely difficult to do. Therefore, “training in rate perception and modification should be more rigorously incorporated into teacher training programs” so that teachers can learn to slow down their speech when necessary. Speech engineers could contribute to the pedagogy of public speaking by developing applications that give online feedback on rate of speech, so that speakers could be warned when they begin to speak too quickly. Indeed, present-day dictation software could give this kind of information after the fact, by calculating the words transcribed in relation to the time spent speaking.

 

EXPLICATION OF KEY FACTS AND IDEAS GIVEN IN THE TEXT, SELECTING KEY WORDS, ABSTRACT WRITING, ORAL PRESENTATION

 

Instruction: These are guidelines for presentation issues which usually pose a big problem for graduate students and young researchers. This is a collection of data from study materials placed in the Internet without copyright limitations. You are sure to realize that, no matter how brilliant your ideas might be, they will fail to achieve their potential because of your failure to address presentation issues. On reading and understanding the following information your purpose will be to acquire the standard guidelines along which a presentation is built. This will be your goal as a graduate student and beginning researcher.

Many good research papers fail to achieve their potential because of the student's failure to address six important presentation issues: (1) Presentation Format; (2) Grammar and Style; (3) Adequate Research; (4) Citation; (5) Plagiarism; and (6) Field Component.

 

(1) Presentation Format:

Your professor normally will indicate the type of presentation format preferred for a graduation paper. Your oral presentation is based on the summary of your graduation paper. In general, all papers should be typed, headings and subheadings should be used to indicate the major sections of the paper. Consult with your professor for specific requirements on this issue.

 

(2) Syntax and Grammar:

There is nothing more frustrating than reading a research paper plaguedwith vocabulary and syntax errors! In a computerized environment, vocabulary errors and major syntax errors are totally unacceptable.

Read over your presentation text carefully BEFORE you print out the final copy. Have a friend or relative read the paper back to you so you can listen to how it sounds. Watch out for simple language problems. If you are unsure about any grammar or vocabulary issue, consult a writing aid, or ask your professor for help. Remember, it's not only important what you say, but how you say it! The key to a successful paper is to EDIT, EDIT, EDIT!!!

 

(3) Quality of Research:

A well written and researched paper should draw from accepted academic sources. What are academic sources? Primarily, these are books written by academics and other experts as well as professional journal articles. Academic journal articles are those published in accepted professional journals, usually 10-15 pages in length, with a detailed bibliography, and are usually peer reviewed by other academics and professionals. Check with your professor if you are unsure about a particular journal source. Articles that are NOT considered academic in nature are those published in media magazines that are often anonymous in nature, short in length, and with no cited bibliography. Other NON-JOURNAL sources include statistical abstracts, encyclopedias, reference books, etc. Although these are valid and very useful sources, and should be used in your work, they do not fit the definition of "academic journal articles" for the purpose of a research paper.

Be extremely careful about material read and downloaded from the Internet or any world-wide web source. Most academic journal articles are not available on the web. If you find material on the Web, it must meet the criteria outlined above to qualify as a legitimate academic journal article. All material downloaded from the Web and used in a paper should be checked against other reputable sources. DO NOT try and submit prepackaged research papers downloaded from the Web! You will be caught, you will receive an "F" for the course, and you will be charged with fraud!

(4) Citation:

Your research paper will contain material gained from a variety of academic and non-academic sources. All sources must be clearly and correctly attributed in the text and listed in a Bibliography or Works Cited section at the end of your paper.

(5) Plagiarism:

Plagiarism is a serious problem that is not very well understood by most students. Simply stated, plagiarism is the act of passing someone else's work off as your own or using someone's research without proper citation. Direct plagiarism occurs when a passage is quoted verbatim (word for word).

Indirect plagiarism occurs when the student paraphrases the original work without giving credit to the original author. Paraphrasing means to substitute certain words and to alter some sentences while repeating all the main ideas. Even though the original work was not copied verbatim, the ideas and substance have been copied.

If you use ANY piece of material from a published (or, in certain circumstances, unpublished) source, you MUST provide proper citation. The rules on how to avoid plagiarism can be quite confusing. Consult your professor or a good writing guide on tips to avoid this serious problem. Basically, you should have a citation in every paragraph where you have used material from a published source, including the Internet.

Moreover, EVERY map, table, graphic, or picture that you include from whatever source (even if it's your own material) must have a proper caption and a full citation (i.e. Source: Photograph by the author). DO NOT fill up the paper with lines of direct quotes from material. Put the material in your own words and cite the original source.

If you have more than four lines of direct quotation on any one page in your paper, you probably have too much direct quotation. If in doubt about this, talk to your professor!

Learn the rules NOW!! DO NOT PLAGIARIZE.

(6) Your field Component of the Research Paper:

Finally, we come to the very heart of many research paper problems – the failure to include your field component in the paper. Having your field component does not mean throwing some table in at the end of the research paper!

Your discipline is concerned with definite relationships. Ask yourself at the beginning of the research project what the field component of your paper is going to be. What pattern or process are your investigating? How has it changed? How might it change as the result of some action or process?

Also important to this concept is the "SO WHAT? " question. You must have a good rationale for conducting the research. Why are you researching this topic or issue? Adding to the body of knowledge about a topic, exploring new methodological approaches to a problem or issue, evaluating policy implications for a specific problem, or helping us to understand more fully the complexity of human-environment relationships all are solid rationales for conducting research.

Finally, and above all, you should enjoy your research. Choose issues or problems that really motivate you and challenge you professionally and intellectually. Don't opt for the already hashed-over approach that will bore you to distraction. Address the serious and challenging issues – the reward and satisfaction will be much higher in the long run.

Answer the following questions:

· Did your professors indicate the type of presentation format in your research field? If they did, when did you learn about it first?

· Are grammar and style criteria important in Ukrainian language papers?

· What academic sources do you regularly use?

· Do you often download from the Internet?

· Do you always check downloaded data against reputable sources?

· What is meant by indirect plagiarism?

· What is meant by direct plagiarism?

· What is meant by a field component of a research paper?

· How can you avoid plagiarism in your research paper?

Prepare a 5 minute talk on Rebecca Hincks’ study of oral presentations as a spoken genre.

 

Section 2. Grammar workout