Gordon Wells
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Date: Fri, 31 May 1996 11:25:15 -0800
From: Susan Ervin-Tripp <ervintr1 who-is-at violet.berkeley.edu>
To: info-childes who-is-at andrew.cmu.edu
Subject: international audiences
We have been hoping to enlarge the participation and
leadership of scholars from a wide range of societies and
languages. An important way to do this is to make sure our
presentations at international congresses are mutually
successful. As a former teacher of English as a Second
Language, I have the following suggestions on presentation
to groups of various linguistic backgrounds.
1. Prepare a talk, don't ad lib. Ad libs tend to be more
colloquial . Avoid colloquialisms, which aren't likely to be
familiar to your audience.
2. Since most of your audience can understand written
English well, convert most of your talk to overhead
transparencies which will be shown concurrently with
your talk. Start with the summary of main points, which
you can use both to begin and to end your talk to make it
memorable.
3. Prepare the talk orally, with overhead transparencies
and written outline derived from an oral presentation. The
effect of imagining a visible audience is to simplify syntax, to
supply repetitions and section summaries, and to define and
illustrate new terminology. There is nothing harder to
follow than a publication-ready written academic paper.
4. English is now an international lingua franca, which
means its speakers vary widely in the prosodic and
phonetic versions of English they have heard and
understand. Watch your audience, not looking at the most
responsive person, as we usually do, but the one who seems
to be having trouble following you, then slow down for that
target. Adjust your talk length to the time allowed,
remembering that about 100 words a minute is fast for
second-language listeners. (There are about 300 words on a
typed page).
Comments and revisions welcomed.
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Susan M. Ervin-Tripp tel (510) 642-7137
Psychology Department FAX (510) 642-5293
University of California ervintr1 who-is-at violet.berkeley.edu
Berkeley CA 94720
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