Developing Public Speaking Skills

Public speaking involves talking in front of a group of people, usually with some
preparation. It can be in front of people that you know (e.g. at a family celebration) or
a crowd of strangers. Unlike a presentation there normally isn’t a lot of opportunity for
interaction between the audience and the speaker – the speaker speaks, and the
audience (hopefully) listens.

Speeches have different functions. These include being persuasive (e.g. trying to
convince the audience to vote for you), informative (e.g. speaking about the dangers
of climate change), entertaining (e.g. a best man’s speech at a wedding) or
celebratory (e.g. to introduce the winner or an award). Some speeches may have
more than one of these aims.

Why is public speaking useful for students?

Most people, at some point in their life, will need to stand up and speak in front of a
group of people. Teaching students the necessary skills for doing this will therefore
help them to do this more successfully. As a result of the practice, students often
report an increase in general confidence as well as a marked sense of achievement.
Many students get incredibly nervous the first time they have to do a speech in front
of their classmates but with practice the nerves subside and they usually begin to
enjoy the whole process.

Working on public speaking also helps to develop students’ overall fluency and
requires them to consider how they speak as well as what they say. This is useful for
speaking in any situation, public or otherwise.

What techniques can we teach our students?

a) Ideas/content generation

Lots of students find getting started quite difficult. It’s a good idea to give students
either a type of public speech that you would like them to do, or a particular topic. It’s
often useful to get students working in groups at the planning stage, helping each
other to come up with ideas.

Showing students a variety of ways of making notes of ideas works well as not
everyone likes the same methods. These could include mind-mapping, making lists
or writing ideas on post-it notes and then arranging them on a piece of paper into
groups.

b) Structure

Stress the importance of having a beginning, middle and end and keep reminding
them of this. You might then like to give them a standard introduction to use for their
first speech. For example, “Good evening. My name is X and today I am going to talk
about Y. I will talk about three main areas, X, Y and Z”. This then gives them a focus
for the structure of the rest of the speech. It can seem a little dry, however, so once
they get the idea it’s worth experimenting with different styles of beginning – e.g.
using jokes and anecdotes.

Many students are so relieved to have got to their end of their speech that they rush
the conclusion or sometimes completely forget to do one. Again, a suggested format
may help them to summarise what they have said.
c) Body language

There are various statistics for how much of our communication is done through our
body languages – they seem to hover around 70%, which is a massive chunk, so
some work in this area is a very good idea.

 Posture: Doing an activity where you get everyone to stand up and then
suddenly ‘freeze’ works well. You then ask everyone to stay still but look
around at how everyone is standing. They try getting everyone to stand
straight and well-centred, behind the podium if you have one to use. You’ll be
surprised how many people rock from side to side or slouch. Sounds pretty
basic but it can make a big difference to how confident and in control
someone appears to be.

 Gestures: One way to practice these is to give out some sentences with key
words in them, such as “I caught a fish and it was this big!” or “there are three
important reasons why you should vote for me. Ask the students to practise
saying these sentences while standing up and work out what gestures might
be most appropriate. Stress the importance of keeping gestures controlled.

 Eye contact: it’s very important that speakers make eye contact with all areas
of the room, ideally with every person but with large audiences that isn’t
possible. Many students tend to look at one spot or at the teacher. One way
to practice this is to ask each student to do a short 30 second introduction
and then at the end get any student who feels the speaker did not look in
his/her direction to raise their hand.

c) Chunking (pauses and stress)

This is technique which can help speakers to sound much more confident and
increase the overall effectiveness of their speech. The theory is that when we do this
type of speaking we stress the key words in a sentence which carry the meaning,
e.g. “I DON’T want you to just SIT there and DO NOTHING” we also pause after
many of these keywords, and at the end of a sentence.

To practice this, try playing your students an example of speech – Earl Spencer’s
eulogy speech for Diana is a good one for this, or Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a
dream’. Ask them to listen and identify the stressed words and pauses from a small
section of the speech and then practice delivering it in the same manner. They can
then mark the stress and pauses on their own speeches and practice incorporating
the idea into their own work. It really makes a difference!

Common problems and solutions

 Lack of confidence

This is very common and one that only practice, practice and more practice
will help to overcome. You could also try getting the students to first speak in
front of three or four other, then adding to the number as they become more
confident.

 Speaking too fast

This is another common one, usually caused by nerves. Try getting them to
do the introduction of the speech in an exaggeratedly slow manner. Once
 they have done this a few times they may find it easier to find a middle
ground.

 Appropriacy of body language

If this is a problem, try videoing the speaker and asking them to watch
themselves. They will usually be able to identify where the problems lie and
then work on improving these areas. Raising awareness is the most important
thing here.

 Boring speeches!

It’s really important to get the students to think carefully about their audience
when planning their speech. For example, if they want to do a speech about
the dangers of smoking, but no one in the class smokes, this probably won’t
be very interesting

 Appropriacy of style

Here again it is important that the students think about their audience. You
might like to play them several different examples of famous speeches and
ask them to comment on the style and discuss the purpose of the speech and
the audience, before reflecting on their own.

 Plagiarism of material

Unfortunately this is a very common problem. One way to tackle this is to ask
the students not to write out their speeches in full but to use only notes or
keywords to help them deliver their speech. This then increases the chances
of them being more original with the delivery. Another option is to collect in
the speeches and run whole sentences through an Internet search engine to
see if it comes up with anything. And of courses, impress upon your students
the importance of doing their own work!