Reflection on Oral Presentation

Preparation

My team mates and I prepared our slides few days before the presentation. We reviewed and commented on each other’s slides for any mistakes before rehearsal. We have the luxury of having several rehearsals before the presentation and it helps in familiarizing me with the flow of presentation. I prepared supplementary slides as I foreseen that the audience might need me to clarify some of the parts in a clearer way, which I thought I would not be able to do it during the 5-minute presentation due to time constraint.

Delivery

For this oral presentation, I believe I appeared to be less nervous. I refrained myself from reading out from the cue cards, unlike my peer teaching session. Although my speech was not really very smooth, I have more eye contact with the audience and was able to pay attention to and observe their response and facial expressions. I was focused during Q and A session, and was able to answer questions tactfully with my team mates.

As I am a more Mandarin speaking person, my English proficiency has to be improved. I tried to be persuasive and assertive in giving speech and answering questions as well as to end the presentation memorably, but my speech could be more fluent and impressive if I improve on this area.

The non verbal cues that I transmitted during the presentation could also be better. Although I feel my gestures, expression and enthusiasm were better this time, there is still room for improvement. Probably because I am very introverted since young, I used to be more rigid when I am standing in front of the audience.

Use of slideware

We tried to use simple layout so as to keep our slides easy to be digested. Fancy layouts were minimized to avoid disturbance to graphs in the slides. I was really bad at handling the “clicker” and it must be distracting to the audience during my presentation. However, I carried on explaining to them without the slides while my supportive team mates were busy solving the problem for me at the back. After all, the slides are supposed to aid my presentation or my speech, but they should not be the main focus (I hope).

All in all, I did improve on some of the areas that I discovered and Ms. Lim pointed out after peer teaching but I believe I still need to improve on those areas. I feel that our presentation was generally okay and it is certainly an invaluable experience.