Data collection

Instruction in presentation skills is an important component in the Technical English classes. The students practice what they have learnt by holding their own presentation and by analyzing other presentations in the form of written peer review comments. The presentation is to be about ten minutes in length though teachers generally do not enforce the time restrictions as strictly as is commonly done in conference settings. The topic for the presentation is up to the student but is to be of a basically technical nature.

All students but one used presentation software. Speaker 8 used overhead transparencies. None of the speakers used a manuscript. Teachers and classmates gave the students feedback on the class presentation.

During the two different terms when these subjects were studying English, they and many of their classmates allowed their classroom presentations to be audio recorded as part of a larger effort to collect a presentation corpus, presently consisting of about 100 recordings. All Swedish natives were also asked whether they would like to present their presentation again, this time in Swedish, for a small sum of money. Though many students expressed an initial willingness, scheduling difficulties and time pressures in the end narrowed down to a group of five students in Fall 2004, and nine students in Spring 2006. The students were told that they could use the same visual material as they had used for the English material and were assembled in small groups, so that an audience would be present to hear the presentation.

Audio recordings were made directly into a computer using a small clip-on microphone. Analysis was done using WaveSurfer (Sjölander & Beskow, 2000) to present the speech waveform and enable the measurement of pause length.

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