Portfolio 12.

Analyzing my performance in the oral presentation, I think it was clear enough and exemplifications were simple to be understood by everybody. My group could get to the punctual idea of what writing is about, and we tried to provide our mates with enough information about how we can develop this skill, in different aspects. Personally, visual aids helped me to follow a correct order of my exposure. I prepared a power point with clear pictures, drawings, examples and webs to exemplify what I was saying.

I could realize that the majority of my mates could follow my explanations because I used my own words, and that made it very understandable. Eye contact and pronunciation were two important issues I paid attention to. It helped me to improve my performance on the spot. I could realize if my mates were boring, or if they could not follow my speech, or if I was not being clear in the explanations. What I should acknowledge, is that I did not focus on Intonation. I was concentrated on how and what I was going to say next.

Honestly, I should admit that I could take just some notes. It depended on the speaker, whether he or she was clear and lively on his or her speech I was able to understand better than with those students who had a monotonous tone of voice, or those who were reading what they were suposed to explain with their own words. In this way, I could profit from those students who did it well, and take into account  errors with the purpose of not committing them myself in the future. What I would change on my own performance is the quality of language I used to explain things. Maybe I got lost trying to find the right words and, as a consequence, I used a lot of words to explain simple things, adding extra time to my performance.

Of course every member of the group had to read the whole chapter to understand the central theme and organize our speech. This helped us to connect the different parts of our power point to make it coherent and cohesive. We were able to link concepts in a hierarchical order of importance, and relation between them. We tried to make it simple and clear for us and for our mates to achieve a good performance.

I could find two positive aspects in our oral presentation. Firstly, I could perfectly connect what I read in the sources to my classes of English (EFL classes), because depending on the context I can use some aspects to improve my students’ writing through the explanation of the use of linkers, and how they help to the connectedness of a text, how to organize ideas before writing a text, and how to provide a good topic sentence. The second positive aspect of presenting this kind of task, is that it prepares us for future important presentations, and gives us confidence to be in front of a class.