English Speaking Communication: Presentations- Secrets of the Pros for Reading a Speech  

Sometimes pros will read their speech.   I’ve seen pros look and sound very, very good.  They used special strategies to maximize the effectiveness of their presentation.  Here are some of my favorite tips and strategies from the pros:

• No matter what format you use for delivering the speech (note cards or printed speech), it should probably start out as a full text.  Here you can make sure you are saying what you want to say.  Here you determine pauses and other details of effective delivery
• As you work over your speech during rehearsals,  make notes on the text.  Use highlighter or underline or circle words.
  • Then you can go right to the phrases that will trigger the train of thought.
  • You have your own personal road map to help you move quickly through the speech and ensure that you don’t lose your place.
  • Your cards or text should include your grabber at the top or on the front page.  This should be memorized so you can deliver it looking right at the audience.  You should try to memorize your conclusion too.

Layout of Printed Speech

• Print the speech in large, dark, typeface that you can read while standing upright at the lectern.
• Use upper and lower case, rather than all caps, because it makes it easier to scan.
• Most speakers like the speech to be double- or triple-spaced and pages to be numbered, just in case the entire speech tumbles to the floor.
• Put the speech into a folder or a pocket folder.  A portfolio that can display two entire pages of the speech at once and facilitates sliding pages smoothly.
• Don’t staple the speech but use a paper clip to hold the speech together.
• As you finish each page, slide it across into the “out” pile.  This avoids flipping and page-turning.

Eye Contact

• With the full text written out, a great strategy to maintain eye contact is by looking up at the end of each sentence.

For the next blog on doing presentations, we jump backward in time.  To come is clever advice from the pros about how much time you will need to prepare for a presentation.  That will prevent you from getting the crazy, stress-filled last-minute scramble to a great presentation.

Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos and Accent Reduction Tip videos  for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.

Rerun from Aug 13, 2013 and Oct 5, 2016

Three of the Most Commonly Mispronounced English Sounds for Indian Speakers

In India, about 10 percent of the population are English speakers.  Of these, 226,449 speak English as a first language, while 125,000,000 speak English as an additional language. About 4 percent of the population consider themselves fluent

Our Indian students live in:

• Boulder & Denver, Colorado; California; Florida; Virginia; North Carolina, Pennsylvania; Louisiana and in Canada.

Why do Indian people have such difficulty with clear English pronunciation?

•  They use the pronunciation from their 35 native languages on their English speech.
• In those languages, most speech sounds are spoken quickly.  In American English, some sounds are spoken quickly but others are spoken slowly.
• Multiple syllable words are especially difficult to understand because the sounds are spoken so quickly
• There are different positions of the tongue, lips, teeth and jaw for many of the Indian-English speech sounds.
• The stiffness or tenseness of the speech muscles are greater for many Indian-English speech sounds than in American English.

What are three of the most difficult sounds for our Indian students to say accurately in English?

• “w”   

• “t”   

• “th”   

Why are these so difficult?

• Two of these sounds are produced slowly in American English – “w” and “th.”
• Positioning of the lips for “w” and the tongue for “th” is quite different than Indian-English
• The tongue is more relaxed for the “t” in American English than in Indian English

Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos and Accent Reduction Tip videos  for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.

Rerun from July 31, 2013 and Sep 28, 2016.

Rerun from July 29, 2013 and October 31, 2016

Three of the Most Commonly Mispronounced English Sounds for Chinese Speakers

In Asia, the number of English-users has surpassed 350 million, equal to the number of people who live in countries where English is the dominant language: the United States, Britain, and Canada. More Chinese children now study English — about 100 million — than there are Britons.

Our Chinese and other Asian students live in:

• Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins, Colorado; California, Oregon, Washington State, Washington, DC, Virginia, New York, etc.
• Canada, Australia, Luxembourg, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, … all over.  

Why Chinese people have such difficulty with English pronunciation?

• Like all people learning another language, Chinese people will use the pronunciation from their native language on their English speech.  That’s what people call accent—Chinese-English accent (Chinlish!).  Not native accent.
• Because the roots of their language is so different from English, the speech sounds are also pronounced very differently.
• Different position of the tongue, lips, teeth, jaw.
• Different muscle strength.
• Different speed of muscles for speech sounds.

What are the three most difficult sounds for our Chinese students to say accurately in English?

• “r”   

• “L”  

• Short vowel “a” as in “hat”   

Why are these the most difficult?

• To make these sounds accurately takes particular and difficult positions of the tongue
  • The position of the tongue is so difficult that the “r” is also the most difficult sound for native-born English speakers to say.  Some children don’t master this sound until they are seven years or older
  • To make an accurate “L” consistently means to train the tongue to push out to the lip, and most languages do not require this movement.
  • To make an accurate  short vowel “a” as in “hat” also requires the same strong “push tongue” muscles as for the “L.” Most languages do not require these muscles to be strong.

Surprise! (Smile!) That also means, of course, that these sounds are also difficult for many people who speak one of the 4000 languages of the world!

Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos and Accent Reduction Tip videos  for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.

Check out our advanced weekly speech tip program, our new subscription called ClearTalk Weekly, www.subscription.cleartalkmastery.com

Rerun from July 24, 2014 and September 21, 2016