Materials Development for the ESP context: Post-presentation and feedback reflection

Materials Development for the ESP context: Post-presentation and feedback reflection

With respect to team-planning, I will once again say I liked working with Melisa. We make a good team in the sense that we both do as much as we both can “independently” of the other, given the responsibilities and duties we each have. What I mean is that we both took the liberty to move forward with the tasks by ourselves in a particular week, for example, and not do so and let the other work in another week and then, when we could, we got together and discussed what we had done so far. In this way, instead of waiting for that moment when our schedules finally allowed us to meet and thus waste time by not doing anything until we could get together, each of us simply built on the other person’s work and then we both commented on and made decisions about our work.

As regards the presentation itself, I believe the feedback is almost the same I might have given myself. I agree that some of the slides contained too much information, for example. 

Once again, I, too, noticed that during my presentation I got somewhat muddled when I talked about elaboration and I had to move forwards and backwards in the PowerPoint presentation. In our report, elaboration is dealt with after considering many other aspects of text selection, and the slides were designed according to the presentation. When I was rehearsing the oral delivery, nonetheless, I decided to move the explanation on elaboration forward but did not even think about the order in which the slides were organized (in my mind, the presentation – even when I had seen it many times – was just fine and coincided with the order in which I wanted to present things). I guess I simply assumed that I remembered how the slides where laid out, instead of rehearsing my oral presentations together with the slides. This is something I now realize I should not take for granted next time.

I realized, as well, that our presentation seemed to drag on for ages, probably because we focused too much on presenting the details of the theoretical background. After seeing the first presentations (by other classmates), I remember thinking that a good idea was to make the rationale for the tasks interact with the reading comprehension tasks in themselves; i.e., to go back and forth between one and the other so that the theory could be appreciated in the actual tasks we designed. Nonetheless, I think we did not achieve this. My feeling, during and after Melisa’s and my presentation, was that we took eighty per cent of the time to speak about theory and then, in just a few minutes, we showed the tasks. I believe this is what made our presentation somewhat long and maybe a bit boring.

In response to another of the evaluator’s comments, I should say that I had not become aware that my use of discourse markers was ineffective. I think I unconsciously go to a more practical way of introducing things, rather than trying to focus on following a specific structure and signalling each stage every time. I think this is my way of dealing with topics in general, because I believe the new generations (the ones I will have to teach) work in this way – I actually once heard a remarkable anthropologist and sociologist, Josefina Dartelongue, saying this. Maybe these are the reasons why I forget to pay attention to the use of discourse markers, but I will keep the comments in mind for the future.

Finally, I had not thought about the fact that it might be better to exclude the conclusion from the outline. I think we just simply assumed that, because we were advised to outline our presentation – and because the concluding remarks were part of the presentation –, we had to name this last section in our outline.

On a different note, I am glad you liked our “ludic” idea of giving the presentation a congress-like atmosphere. We are actually happy that we are allowed to take those sorts of liberties in the teaching-training program, because it is the kind of thing that lets us “have fun” with academic work and brings joy to the rest of the class as well.