Page 7 - 2_studijní opora - modul 8ANG

You may know that listening is much more difficult than reading since you hear
it, as a rule, only once and you can´t get back as you do in reading. Listeners
(= the audience) listen somewhere between 25% and 50% of the time. Moreover,
people’s memory is quite limited; the short-term memory holds only 5 to 7 points
and people remember only 10% of what they hear (compared to 50% of what
they read). Thus, if your audience listens only part of the time and remembers
only 10% of what they hear, then your “communication window” is around 2.5%
to 5.0% of your total presentation time. Keep this in mind when preparing your
talk. Do everything you can to help the audience to listen and remember.

These facts lead to the choice of language register (vocabulary, grammar,
sentence structure, …) as will be discussed in Chapter 3.

Structure
Generally, a good presentation starts with an introduction and a “human touch”
(sometimes called “icebreaker”), which can be a joke, story, interesting fact,
quotation, or even an activity to get the group warmed up and to create a link
between the speaker and the audience. The introduction also needs an
objective, i.e. the purpose of the presentation (what you want to reach through
it). This all should be said at the beginning.

Next comes the body of the presentation, the topic itself. This gives the
information you want to communicate.

After the body, closing or conclusion follows. Here you will include an overall
summary, consequences of your findings, and proposed actions, options or
solutions. This is not just to repeat the data or summarize results; look at the
problem from distance, put it in context, give possible effects, applications, etc.

In brief, when you are building the structure of your presentation, in individual
parts consider the following:

Introduction

 What? - Overview of presentation (use visual aids if necessary).
 Why? - Purpose of presentation - why is the subject important?
 How? - Format you will use; what can the audience expect to see and
learn?

Main body

The main body can be organized in various ways, as indicated further:
 Timeline or logical progression – arranged in a chronological order
(information from the beginning to the end, earlier to later), indicate steps
(A then B then C);

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From the beginner to the mentor (Supporting strategies of education of teachers in Zlin region)
Fund of Educational Policy project, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports