Before You Watch

Reflect on Your Experience

1. What kinds of presentational activities serve to engage students? How do you plan for students' engagement when designing a presentational activity in which students are presenters? In which students are the audience?

2. What kinds of audiences could be the focus of a student presentation? What is the effect of identifying an audience other than the teacher?

3. What goal might you have for a presentational activity in your class? In which part of a lesson or unit do you typically include oral or written presentations by students? What activities do you try to build into a unit to help students be successful in producing the presentational product?

Examine the Research

Article

1. This article focuses on writing. What aspects of the article also hold true for oral presentations? What differences would have to be addressed?

2. What advantages do you see in using "prompts" to focus a writing task? An oral task? What kinds of prewriting strategies do you tend to use for your writing tasks? For your oral tasks?

3. How has a process approach to writing helped make students more successful at writing than they may have been with previous models? Why are the drafting and revising stages important in presentational communication?

4. Analyze the three examples of a writing task that has been spiraled for students at different proficiency levels ("Teaching Foreign Language Writing," Figs. 2-4). How does the task differ from one level to the next? How is it the same? How does modifying the task enable you to use the same content at each level? What types of presentational tasks are appropriate for beginning students? How might you increase the expectation of what students will produce at the intermediate and pre-advanced stages?

5. The article lists 10 suggestions for teaching writing from the beginning stages of language study. Which three suggestions strike you as particularly relevant to your teaching situation? Why?