Unit 1-21. THE USE OF ESP IN BUSINESS ORAL PRESENTATIONS

Section 1. Guidelines for reading texts on the use of international English in European business

A Swedish researcher Rebecca Hincks’ studyquantifies differences in slower speaking rates of Swedes in business meetings, and examines the effects of slower rates on the speaker’s ability to convey information. The participants of her experiment were fourteen fluent ESP speakers, Swedish student engineers, who held the same oral presentation twice, once in English and once in their native Swedish. The temporal variables of mean length of runs and speaking rate in syllables per second were calculated for each language. Speaking rate was found to be 23% slower when using English. The slower rate of speech was found to significantly reduce the information content of the presentations when speaking time was held constant. Her study study definitely dispels any misunderstanding that ESL speakers can manage to deliver the same amount of information despite their slower rate of speech in English. Therefore, training in rate perception and modification should be more rigorously incorporated into teacher training programs so that teachers can learn to slow down their speech when necessary.

Text 1-21. SPEAKING RATE AND INFORMATION CONTENT IN ENGLISH LINGUA FRANCA ORAL PRESENTATIONS

(Based on Rebecca Hincks’ study of oral presentations as a spoken genre)

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