Presentations in English: Student's Book DVD Pack

Ace

Excellent support to develop different presentation styles centered on the audience needs and interests. Provides clear and practical step by step presentation preparation process.Nevertheless, Its most is: the connection to multiple intelligence and learning profiles concepts! I love it. Gigi Scarbeck

I'm an English teacher training businesspeople in Spain. I bought this book to give me ideas for coaching students on 2-day workshops on presentations skills. The first 3 chapters cover the basics of presenting, followed by focuses on more in-depth skills and techniques. The accompanying DVD shows full, and extracts, of real presentations made by 4 students following the course. Written by a highly experienced trainer, it's extremely comprehensive, up-to-date and original, packed full of great ideas and tips. I like the way it challenges some traditional views on presenting and really encourages students to find their own style and be original. My students found it really useful to learn from the successes and mistakes in the filmed presentations, and found the activities stimulating and useful. Suitable for very good Intermediate level and above, there's enough material here to do a 3-month course. So if you only need the basics, you'll have to select the most important bits. I needed it to be a little more business-oriented, but was able to successfully adapt it to suit my students' needs. Excellent value, and a great resource for EFL teachers.

Each chapter covers a different aspect of making presentations: the first talks about how to begin, how to structure key points and how to conclude, while the last talks about how to handle questions at the end. The chapters in between cover such topics as how to keep your audience's attention, being persuasive, using visuals and connecting with your audience. Within each chapter there is a discussion of techniques, a rich collection of very useful expressions, and a brief overview of relevant grammar (often tied together on a coherent topic such as presenting statistical information, graphs, etc.). All of this is tied in with the samples on the DVD, taken from four presentations which are chopped up so that relevant bits are associated with each chapter. The full presentations also appear. These samples are not necessarily model talks, but realistic examples by other non-native speakers, complete with faults, but this is useful when it comes to analysing them. It also helps to make the book work both for self-study and in the classroom. One small room for improvement: it would be nice if the DVD had subtitles. There are transcripts at the back of the book (which also point out the grammatical mistakes that each speaker makes), but it would have been a nice touch to have them on the DVD itself, too. All in all, the book has everything I was looking for, and at a reasonable price: lots of useful expressions and structures, samples, a DVD, plus a presentation of techniques that even native speakers could benefit from.