IE3 Core Thursday: Lesson 9

Hi everyone,

Just one more week, and you'll be giving your presentations.

Types of Support for your Opinions
 At the beginning of today's lesson, we reviewed opinion giving structure and the types of support you can use to support your reasons for your opinion.

Types of Support:
a. personal example
b. explanation (e.g. facts)
c. statistics
d. expert opinion

Example:
Opinion: In my opinion dogs are better than cats.
Reason: This is because dogs are friendlier.
Example: When I was a child, I had three dogs and they always wanted to play with me, but my cats usually wanted to be alone.

Remember that we can also call support details -- just like the details you had to give in your presentation outline.

Discussions:
For your discussions, you've all made a lot of improvement. Today's discussions lasted 25 minutes each!! When we first started our course, your discussions were only 12 minutes!  This shows that your conversational style is getting better. Great work!

Body Language:
To help you deliver your presentations next week, we learned about gestures and voice inflection.

Non-verbal language (body language) is just as important (or even more important) than the spoken word. To demonstrate this, I gave a short explanation in French. When I gave my explanation without gestures, NOBODY understood what I said. However, when I supported it with gestures, all of you could understand the main idea of my explaination.

There are four types of gestures:
a.  number / sequence
b.  illustration / location
c.  emphasis / focus
d.  comparison

Voice Inflection:
We also learned about voice inflection. We use inflection to emphasize important words/phrases in our presentation, and also to keep the interest of the audience. There are four types of inflection:
a. stress
b. stretch
c. pause

In your presentations next week, you'll need to use gestures and voice inflection.

Homework:
1. Presentation Preparation
2. Read graded reader (10-15 pages)