Effective methods for teaching technical presentations in English to Japanese engineering students: Case study at School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo

Abstract

This paper reports our five-year experience in teaching technical presentations in English to engineering graduate students at School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo. This graduate course ldquoEnglish for Engineers and Scientistsrdquo is a new attempt to teach and train graduate students how to make proper technical presentations in English. The course is composed of lectures on technical presentation for four weeks and practice sessions for seven weeks. In the lectures essential points of technical presentations are discussed in detail and in the practice sessions students are trained through making presentations twice on the same topic. Their presentation skills have been improved by native speaker instructorspsila instructions and suggestions on presentation performances, slides, and English. Native speaker instructorspsila comments in the evaluation reports indicate that almost all the students in their first try made improper presentations by not following the points they learned in the lecture. In their second try, however, they made much better presentations. The class evaluation results show that most of the students have obtained necessary skills of technical presentation. These results indicate that the combined course of lecture and practice sessions is very effective in training students to make better technical presentations in English.