Effat English Academy: Speaking

While there are a few rare people who are naturally good at public speaking, for most people, presentations and critiques can be stressful. If you’re an English language learner at OCAD U, you can book an appointment with an ELL tutor to practice your presentations and to learn strategies to help you with every stage of your presentation.

Here’s a checklist of what to focus on before, during and after your presentation or critique.

You can find specific tips using the links below:

• The Seven Virtues of Presentations and these very detailed Tips and Guides from Hamilton College’s Oral Communication Centre
• Useful Handouts and Speaking Centre Example Videos from the Speaking Intensive Program at the University of Mary Washington
• Tips for speech preparation and persuasive speaking from the Oral Communication Lab, University of Pittsburg
• General advice on Oral Presentations from the Writing and Learning Centre at the University of Toronto
• Hundreds of free articles on public speaking from the Advanced Public Speaking Institute

A tutor can help you to use resources such as the phonetic dictionary, minimal pairs and pronunciation dictionaries which you can then continue to use for self-study.

 International Phonetic Alphabet The IPA can help with learning the pronunciation of words in the dictionaries and to identify the same sounds in different words and spellings.

• Voice and Speech IPA Charts

  This useful Canadian website was developed for actors. It contains vowel, consonant and diphthong charts that use Flash animation for the sounds and names of the IPA symbols.

• English Club Pronunciation

  This free ESL website has a lot of materials and explanations about pronunciation terms, word and sentence stress, how to pronounce –ed and contractions, linking in English, and more.

Pronunciation  Lots of activities and lessons for practicing your pronunciation of American English, including Minimal Pairs, podcasts and videos.

• Ship or Sheep

  Minimal pairs contain a pair of words with different or consonant or vowel sounds that are often confused or mispronounced. This website will help to identify which sounds are or difficult to pronounce English.