Especially in university ESL situations where students are focused on academic English there seems to be a real tendancy towards having students do presentations as part of their oral English language studies.  There are many good reasons to have students do a presentation - even if they really don't like them.

One thing that you can do as a teacher to make the entire experience of presentations a bit more meaningful to your students is to make video (or audio) recordings of them as they do their presentation.  I've done this many times and found that there are several benefits that can be gained from the recordings.

First I should say that I normally don't make a big production out of it.  I simply let the students know that I will have a camera set up in the class to record their presentations.  I usually try to make the camera as inconspicuous as possible as it can make some students a little more nervous.  However in most cases once a student gets started they totally forget about the camera and settle into their presentation.

The Benefits of Making Video Recordings of Student Presentations

There are two very useful things that you can do when you record a presentation.  Video is better of course, but they can be achieved with simple audio recordings as well.  First, you can review the presentations with the students - either as an entire class, or individually.  When a student sees the video of his or her performance, they immediately recognize the areas where they had problems.  They can see things like:

• that they only looked at the teacher rather than the entire class
• that they stood in front of their poster and blocked it from view
• that they interupted their partners repeatedly
• that they played with their hair while chewing their gum
• that they fumbled because their notes weren't well organized
• that they spoke very clearly
• that they had a great smile and good personality
• and lots of other things that nobody notices during their own presentations

I have found these types of video reviews to be invaluable for ESL students overall confidence and ability in giving presentations.  Yes, they laugh at each other, but it is always in a good way, and do they ever learn a lot from each other.

The second benefit is to then take the videos and put them onto a CD or DVD and hand them out to the students.  We are not talking about Hollywood style production here, just copying the video onto the CD/DVD and burning it so the student has it as a momento of their hard work and effort.  Students really love this, and I always get lots of 'thank yous' whenever I do it.

This isn't the place to explain how to burn a DVD of an ESL presentation, but both MacOS and Windows come with software that allows you to copy video from a video camera and burn it to a CD/DVD.

If you've never done it, give it a try.  It will be very rewarding for both you and your students.

Cheers,

Eric

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