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Jeremy Comfort / Patrick Schulz / Peter Franklin
York Associates / Konstanz University of Applied Sciences
1-900991-14-4
This CD-ROM offers multimedia materials for preparing and delivering effective international presentations. It provides a bank of useful and motivating material.
Business Presentations contains three presentations on video, on finance, human resources and a sales presentation. The speakers are British, French and American. The user is able to watch the videos, access the transcript and work on on-screen comprehension exercises. The material is designed for the upper intermediate and advanced student of English. The digital video is good quality.
The course consists of five units: preparing the presentation, introducing the presentation, the main part, closing the presentation and handling questions. The content is appropriate and consistent with that covered on many Business Skills presentation courses.
Each of the five units contains exercises grouped into four areas of input: communication, presentations language, content language and culture. (1) Communication focuses on presentation techniques. (2) Presentations language covers expressions such as "I'd like to move on…" (3) Content language allows the study of lexis connected with the three areas of finance, sales and marketing and Human Resource management. (4) Culture looks at cultural differences in international audiences and adapting presentations to cultural expectations, such as tolerance of humour.
The disc fulfils many of the claims made for it in the promotional notes. It can be used in a blended learning model, where users use the disc in preparation for a real-life presentation. This is arguably the optimal use of this disc, as it enables the learners to benefit from the self-paced aspect of working at the computer, consolidating expressions, and the "live" aspects of actually giving a presentation to tutor and / or classmates. Even if this were not possible, there are many useful self-study activities that can be done alone. There may still be an opportunity to print off an assignment and mail it to a remote trainer. Nevertheless, some of the practice activities are understandably less effective in this model.
One interesting aspect of the disc is the inclusion of a cultural dimension. The disc focuses on areas such as definitions of low and high context cultures; people focus - task focussed cultures; management styles; individualism and collectivism and masculine - feminine, among others. While the disc does not aim to cover all aspects of CAT (Cultural awareness training), those areas covered are relevant. More on body language would be useful.
The cultural activities interspersed through the disc on the whole exploit the medium well. Dragging a pointer to a place on a continuum (high or low context) is appropriate. One excellent exercise involves deciding if a specific descriptor is high or low context, and when you have chosen, your choices automatically go into the appropriate column. The use of graphics of the Power Point slides used in the video clips enlivens the material.
The culture file contains useful information, as well as useful tips such as: "stereotypes represent a view of how groups behave - they should never be applied to individuals". While this information is simply laid out in a scrollable page, and can be gleaned from other books, activities are linked to the specific part of this page for reference and there is a benefit in having it available on the one disc.
Sometimes, the feedback on the exercises is useful. The learner generally has three attempts. Correct answers are shown in green, allowing attention to be paid where improvement needs to be made. However, at times the feedback given is disappointing and can lead to a degree of frustration.
The activities will be familiar to users of multimedia in language teaching - gap-fills, ordering exercises and matching activities. These are given a fresh twist by being linked to business content - so users complete charts and drag and drop words into diagrams, making the activities cognitively challenging. Some of the features of the disc are breathtaking in their effectiveness and simplicity. Allowing learners to "turn over" a card on-screen is simply superb - it re-enforces the usefulness of using cards when giving a presentation.
Among the other features on the disc are:
Some of the terms are likely to be known by students, especially those
in a particular ESP field. Other terms are novel and useful, such as 360
degree appraisal and fringe benefits. The search facility is useful, and
while the knowledge here can be gained from other sources such as an on-line
dictionary, it is useful to have the information under the user's control.
Offers a useful list of the expressions used in giving presentations.
A useful feature is the fact that you can double-click a word in the text and if it is the dictionary, the definition appears on-screen. This information-on-demand nicely exploits the medium. There are 400 words in the dictionary.
The interface and controls however are somewhat small and fiddly, and not altogether intuitive. Where this product scores highly is on uniqueness - any shortcomings are forgivable in that there is nothing around to compare. The disc is thoroughly worthy of the short listing for the British Council Innovation Awards 2004 and is worth investigating by every business English teacher involved in teaching effective presentations. It will be of enormous benefit to learners needing to study this business skill before their face-to-face class - or doing it for real!
For more information see York Associates.