Research On Using Presentation To Improve English Post-graduates' Oral Ability In Normal Colleges

Presentation is a form of speech which aims to share information with the audience. With its use in college courses, it changes the common teacher-centered teaching paradigm. Moreover, it provides students with large quantities of opportunities to train their oral ability, especially that of the academic kind. In addition, presentation can serve as a rehearsal of teaching, which is very useful in training students to be teachers. However, there are also problems in the process of using presentation in colleges. As a result, it is worth investigating whether presentation can help improve English post-graduates'oral ability in normal colleges and how students and teachers can make better use of presentation.Researches on presentation are prevailing both home and abroad. However, researches on presentation from home and abroad are generally affiliated to the studies of speech and the contents of the researches mainly include functions, constituents, presenting skills, suggestions and so on. Monographs are rare to find. There is a newly published monograph in China with the title of "Presentation Skills". However, like other studies, this monograph is lack of field research. So it is necessary to carry out a field research on presentation.By reading a large number of materials, the author designed a questionnaire by herself, which was titled "presentation and oral ability". It deals with oral ability in three parts, students as presenters, students as listeners and the role of teachers. It is centered mainly on three aspects, communicative competence, thinking ability and delivery ability. Questionnaires were handed out randomly to 50 English post-graduates in Central China Normal University. By analyzing the data, this research endeavors to prove presentation can improve their oral ability and to discuss what certain problems may appear in the process of using presentation.According to the research, presentation provides students with a large quantity of quality input as well as output, which lays the foundation for the improvement of oral ability. In addition, presentation enables students to put more focus on discourse competence, socio-linguistic competence and strategic competence. Students are expected to think a lot in presentation, thus their thinking ability gets trained to a great extent, especially logical thinking ability. Besides, students have a better understanding of critical thinking and creative thinking. As for delivery, presentation leads students to realize its significance in presentation and offers students chances to use it. Presentation can also let students practice teaching, which is of great benefit to teachers-to-be. Moreover, by helping students develop independent learners, presentation will help students do better jobs in their future study as far as oral ability is concerned.Other than all the strengths, there are also problems in the process of using presentation. Presentation itself is time-consuming and energy-consuming. In addition, this academic speech might not be widely used in everyday life or teaching and the improvement is not clear in a short range of time. In the perspective of those who participate in presentation, students are biased against presenters and there is also problem with their psychological state:students are afraid of speaking in public and anxiety is a common problem among students. They also tend to rely too much on their teachers. And teachers ought to give more help.On the basis of the results, the paper suggests students should be well aware that presentation can improve their oral ability from different perspectives and they should also draw experience from the presentation. They are supposed to work hard in a presentation and get their oral ability fully trained. They ought to practice a lot both before and after the presentation and pay special attention to using presentation to practice teaching. They should keep in mind to put what they have learned into practice in future study and teaching. And in the teachers'part, this paper offers the suggestions that teachers should shed more focus on instructing students in how to improve oral ability, especially that of the teachers. They are expected to pay more attention to students'psychology and provide more help to students in the comments which should include how they behave in oral ability and how they can improve.Through the research, the author aims to make up for the field research of presentation. And it is intended to offer some references to students, teachers and related researchers on how presentation can be used to improve oral ability. Thus, it can be of help to improve the effect of using presentation in English post-graduate courses in normal colleges.