Monday, November 7, 2011

post 5


It is my carelessness that I posted the comments on my own Blog. I will reply my comments on their blogs separately later.

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Generally speaking, I am satisfied with our group’s presentation last Thursday. As for our Moon-cake group, we valued this opportunity to express ourselves, and prepared a lot for the presentation. For example, the first edition of our slides, which had been composed by me, was discussed and modified several times by our group, finally achieving clear-style, straightforward, informative and interesting.

About my performance, this time I have paid attention to the weakness of my peer teaching pointed by Mr. Blackstone. I practiced pronunciation during my rehearsals; I tend to use accent during speaking; also I tried to spot my eye contacts to our classmates, I also paid attention to my position and standing posture, which tried to make sure, everyone’s version would not be blocked and felt comfortable. However, that afternoon I was exhausted and sometimes could not memorize what I needed to demo in the next, that I had to refer to the big screen behind me.  And one more weakness should be I believed I was too excited near the end, which would not be proper if the presentation were hold in a formal business occasion.

As for this course, I really appreciated the helps from all my classmates, as well as from Mr. Blackstone. As what I said in my post 1, I came this course for the sake of learning something, which enabled me more competitive in the future.

After one semester’s intensive training, I have learned a lot of useful from this course.  Before I came, I always had tense error and wrote a sentence without a clear meaning. But after Mr. Blackstone’s penitent instructions, now I can avoid most of tense errors and try to write a sentence in a concise way, with rather clear meaning.

Another memorable activity in the course should be mock job interview. As for our mock job interview, from the role switching between interviewer and candidate, I had understood the state of minds of both examiners and interviewees, which made me confident, and knew how to prepare, perform well during interview.

 

4 comments:

  1. Hi Desmond,

    I would give you the comments that I have noted down during your presentation, I hope I did not miss out anything because it has been quite some time since the presentation.

    For your part, good projection of voice as it was very clear. I would like to comment on the improvement you made about pronouncing words as compared to peer teaching. You have improved a lot and there goes your effort for rehearsing, it paid off :)

    However, I thought your gestures were a little weird and it was quite distracting(this was what I noted down on my paper and I kind of forgot what you did, but it really was quite distracting to me so I wrote it down.)

    There was one part where you just concluded that the students used the facilities once a month because of the short opening hours. However, I felt the ideas here did not flow as well as it could be due to stress and lack of time due to school work.

    Nonetheless, I see the effort you put in to improve yourself since the peer teaching!

    (The following comment will be on all group members blog as I think it is important) Overall, great and feasible ideas presented and I would consider the proposal. However, the slides do not seem to have the same style of presentation and it should look as if it is done by one person. During Q&A, the individuals are snatching to answer some questions. I would like to see more teamwork during Q&A. Nonetheless, an excellent job on the overall presentation! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Desmond,

    I admire your desire in learning English, hence, I'll be giving you a critical comment below.

    First thing I noticed is that you started off with an "errr".
    This distracted your audience even before they had a chance to hear your content.
    Please be careful since you might be judge pre-maturely when doing so.

    And as you stated, you spent quite some time looking at your slides leaving the audience behind.
    My suggestion would be that you stop speaking when you want to refer to your slides.
    When you finish, face the audience, and then resume your speech.

    Your voice projecttion is good.

    For gestures, however, they probably need more attention from you.
    If you watch the OP video you'll see that you've a "default gesture" throughout your presentation.
    This dragged down the effectiveness of your body language since it makes people think no message is communicated via your gestures.

    Now I'll give some advice as a student who also learns English as second language.

    1. Don't use good-looking words that you're unfamiliar with.
    Instead of making your work more beautiful, it can cause miscommunication.
    For instance, I guess you got "penitent" directly from a dictionary and probably you meant "persistent/continual".

    2. You don't need to always use complex/compound sentences.
    Simple sentences can convey your idea effectively.
    Let's consider the last sentence of your first paragraph.
    "For example, the first edition of our slides - which had been composed by me - was discussed and modified several times by our group. As a result, we produced a more interesting, informative and straightforward version at the end."
    I believe separating it into 2 simpler sentences would make the idea clearer to the readers.

    Cheers,
    Tong

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Desmond,

    I admire your desire in learning English, hence, I'll be giving you a critical comment below.

    The first thing I noticed is that you started off with an "errr".
    This distracted your audience even before they had a chance to hear your content.
    Please be careful since you might be judged pre-maturely when doing so.

    And as you stated, you spent quite some time looking at your slides leaving the audience behind.
    My suggestion is that you pause speaking when you want to refer to your slides.
    When you finish, face the audience, and then resume your speech.

    Your voice projecttion is good.

    For gestures, however, they probably need more attention from you.
    If you watch the OP video you'll see that you've a "default gesture" throughout your presentation.
    This dragged down the effectiveness of your body language since it makes people think no message is communicated via your gestures.

    Now I'll give some advice as a student who also learns English as second language.

    1. Don't use good-looking words that you're unfamiliar with.
    Instead of making your work more beautiful, it can cause miscommunication.
    For instance, I guess you got "penitent" directly from a dictionary and probably you meant "persistent/continual".

    2. You don't need to always use complex/compound sentences.
    Simple sentences can convey your idea effectively.
    Let's consider the last sentence of your first paragraph.
    "For example, the first edition of our slides - which had been composed by me - was discussed and modified several times by our group. As a result, we produced a more interesting, informative and straightforward version at the end."
    I believe separating it into 2 simpler sentences would make the idea clearer to the readers.

    Cheers,
    Tong

    ReplyDelete
  4. I have read through all your comments. Thank you all. I guess in the following courses and real life, I can try my best to improve it~

    ReplyDelete