A presentation in the FL is both a valuable formative learning tool and an effective form of assessment. Delivering a presentation to a group is a key transferable skill and students readily see its value and gain immense satisfaction from completing the task successfully. Knowing one is going to have to perform in public is also a great motivator and students will usually invest considerable time and effort in preparing and understanding material on the topic and in rehearsing their presentation, with huge benefits in terms of independent reading, deep approaches to learning and refining of oral performance (Klapper, 1991). In assessing speaking, it is vital to elicit a sufficient sample of candidates' speech for assessment to be made; presentations provide this in abundance.

Activity 14

Presentations require considerable support to be given to students in the preparation phase, in particular guidance on techniques for employing visual material, voice projection and other paralinguistic features. Generally, students find them stressful affairs, and therefore, if they are to be employed for summative assessment, the ground needs to well prepared and students need a gradual introduction to the activity, with at least one 'dry run' before the real thing. Ideally, they should be given the opportunity to see themselves on video before the actual assessment, so they can get some sense of how they look and sound, and can work on the weaker aspects of their performance. Owing to the public nature of the task, oral presentations, far more than written work, expose the weakest students, and some presentations can be truly painful experiences (faltering delivery, incoherent content, poor pronunciation and intonation), from which others in the class gain very little. In order to guarantee an acceptable minimum level of performance, it is therefore important to ensure weaker students have received every help and that they are encouraged to rehearse this task with particular thoroughness.

If presentations are to be followed by 'questions from the audience' which the presenters are expected to answer in the FL, the task can help to develop broader oral skills. This can act as a useful supplementary means of assessing their knowledge and their ability to use unrehearsed language, something that is especially important if the presentation has revealed substantial rote learning of material. You might choose to reserve some marks in your mark scheme for how well students handle such questions.

Individual presentations are, of course, very demanding and most students prefer to contribute to group presentations. For the tutor, however, this is less satisfactory as it makes it more difficult to assess individual contributions and allows weaker candidates to 'hide' behind more able group members. In such circumstances it is probably fairest to award a single mark for the group performance which is added to an individual mark for each group member, to ensure a degree of differentiation. Making a video recording is the most effective way to assess such group presentations.

Practicalities (eg large numbers) will sometimes dictate that presentations cannot be performed in front of the whole class. Generally, however, it is beneficial to students to watch their peers perform as it allows them to see in what ways they can improve their own performance on such tasks.

It is even more important than with other tasks to ensure students know and understand the criteria to be used to assess their presentation. They need to know which aspects the examiner will focus on and what marks will be awarded to each category (see, for example, the oral criteria for presentations in Appendix 2). A good way to familiarize students with both the task and the criteria is to show them an example of a presentation on video from a previous cohort and to get them to mark the performance using the set criteria. To really involve students in the process, you could ask them to formulate or negotiate their own marking criteria; although this may not be practical if, as there should be, there are agreed departmental criteria for such tasks.

It is generally acknowledged that when students are involved in assessing each other's work, they tend to approach the task very seriously and conscientiously. You might thus consider an element of peer assessment for presentations - eg 50% students' mark, 50% lecturer's mark (see Module 13, section 13.3.2 on peer assessment). This should ensure students do not 'switch off' when others are presenting, as often happens. Having to mark each presentation will force them to attend closely to both the content and the language employed, and as a result they are likely to gain more from each presentation than they otherwise would.