Year 11 English: Preparing for Your Oral Presentation
23 05 2012Hello Year 11s,
Some of you finished your Identity and Belonging assessment tasks today, and while other people are catching up you can make a start on your oral presentation, which is another assessment item and something you will need to complete quite soon.
The first thing that you need to do is settle on an issue and then a contention, since you talk will be persuasive.
Your issue should be something that has been covered in the Australian media in the last twelve month and, let me assure you, that gives you a massive range of subjects to choose from. To get you started, here are some news sites than you can read to see what kinds of issues are available to you.
Once you’ve chosen a topic, you need to settle on your contention. Your contention is the point that you want your audience to believe. This talk is not about telling people both sides of an issue. It is about persuading them to share your view on your chosen issue. Lots of students struggle with this, but you can always ask me for feedback once you’ve written our your contention.
For example, a recent news item tells us that a music streaming called Spotify is not available in Australia. This is an issue, and a common fact, not a contention.
Spotify is bad for local music.
This is a contention, because it is a something that I can convince you to agree with. It’s not a fact. It’s an opinion or point of view.
Spotify is great for music customers.
Again, this is a contention.
Once you’ve settled on your issue and written your contention, run it by me. I don’t tell you what you can argue for, but I go want to make sure that you are clear about what your contention is.
So, now you have your contention.
From there, collect the following information to help you build you argument and your presentation.
- Five statistics or figures that support your contention
- Two stories from real people that support your contention
- Three quotations from experts that support your contention
Once you have all of these, you are very nearly ready to start building you presentation.
If you have time, watch and listen to my presentation about creating effective presentations. It should be able to play just fine on the computers at school. But you don’t have to watch this, and we will be covering this same material in class.
Categories : Year 11 English














