Improving Business Students’ Presentation Skills

Abstract

1 IntroductionIn nowadays' globalising world, the ability to communicate well is prerequisite to success in all areas of life: education, career, (inter-)personal sphere, politics, etc. Educators themselves start training students in these vital skills starting even from an early age. So much more, business schools have communication across the curriculum at the core of their educational policy. Public speaking, as modern art of persuasion, should lie at the heart of pedagogical concerns with regard to students' future employability. For this reasons, educators should display constant preoccupation for including these skills across the curriculum, not only teach them in communication courses. Students need to know how to organise their oral discourse, while exerting persuasion, being able to make others share their vision. The mere presentation of facts, figures or pieces of information is never sufficient to be persuasive, so we have to teach students, besides how to select and organize information, how to use para-verbal and nonverbal communication elements, and how to relate to the audience, developing inter- and intrapersonal skills in order to empathise with the people in front of them. Students also need to learn how to perfectly balance time and content and how to switch from serious tone to an anecdotal vein, in order to keep the audience alert and interested.2 Literature ReviewThe improvement of oral communication skills, as well as public speaking skills are proved to largely contribute to the development of interpersonal communication skills with peers and family, and that of intrapersonal skills, which in turn contribute to self-achievement. According to Halliday (1987: 169), communication represents than merely an exchange of being sociological encounter (Halliday 1987: 139), in other words, it is an exchange of meanings and understandings, human activity based not only words, but also on symbols, gestures, inflexions which contextualise the spoken words. Halliday goes further to assert that communication is a dynamic, interactive process that involves the effective transmission of facts, ideas, thoughts, feelings and values (1987: 34-78), being more than passive act; we actively and consciously engage in communication in order to develop information and understanding required for effective group functioning (Halliday 1987: 34-78). Communication is dynamic as it entails an array of interrelated forces and activities spanning over time, to which contribute the ever-growing and multiplying relationships established between people engaged in communication. Good communicators possess more than just speaking skills. An adept speaker needs to efficiently use body language, to establish and maintain eye contact with the audience, mind his/her posture, facial expression and gestures, his/her position in the space and even walk if possible (Halliday 1987: 44). The para-verbal and non-verbal language are equally, if not more important than the verbal one.Rhetorical devices play compelling role in the success of presentation. They represent powerful tool that contributes to the effectiveness of oral communication. Besides body language mentioned above, substantial verbal language, construed on memorable figures of speech, language patterns, such as anaphora, analogies, similes, comparisons, metaphors, etc. Apart from these rhetorical devices there exist other useful devices in the economy of presentation, such as storytelling. Stories may represent cogent instruments as they acquaint the listener to different atmosphere, an open space where anything is possible (Morgan 2005: 55). According to the same author, story can be built using problem solving strategies, placing the problem in the foreground, from which stems the solution to overcome it, given by the speaker himself (Morgan 2005: 73).The main aspects when speaking about discourse management in speaking are cohesive devices, coherence and cohesion, discourse markers, extent/extended stretches of languages / extended discourse, and relevance. …