An online support site for preparation of oral presentations in science and engineering

Abstract

Oral communication skills are essential for engineers today and, as they are included in accreditation criteria of educational programmes, their teaching and evaluation deserve attention. However, concrete aspects as to what should be taught and evaluated in relation to oral communication skills have not been sufficiently established. In this paper, a method to aid the efficient teaching of oral presentation skills is proposed, from the presentation structure level to word and sentence level choices, through the use of JECPRESE, The Japanese–English Corpus of Presentations in Science and Engineering. As of June 2012, the corpus is composed of transcriptions of 74 presentations delivered in Japanese by students graduating from the Master's programme of various engineering departments and 31 presentations delivered in English, 16 by experienced researchers at an international conference on chemistry, and 15 by undergraduate engineering students of a mid-sized American university. The utterances were classified according to the specific moves (sections of the speech that express specific speaker intent) appearing in the presentations and frequently used words/expressions to express these moves were identified.

Keywords:

• oral communication skills
• ESP
• academic presentation corpus

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C, No. 21520601) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) of Japan. We are also grateful to all who contributed to the data collection process, from the department deans and organising committee chairman to students and researchers who presented and granted us permission to record, transcribe, analyse and upload their presentations.