Improvement Techniques for Foreign Language Technical Presentation Skills Used in Undergraduate Experiment Course

Giving presentations is not an easy task. Especially when it comes to giving in a foreign language, the challenge multiplies. At Japanese Associate Degree Program (JAD Program), Malaysian students are trained to give technical presentations in Japanese. The students who are majoring Mechanical Engineering are required to give experiment result presentations in their sophomore year. At the beginning of the course, the majority of the students are reluctant to prepare for the presentations. This is a natural reaction, because most of the students have been studied Japanese for only two years at the time when this course starts and are not familiar with giving technical presentations in the language. Even in other languages, they have not been trained to give technical presentations. A number of techniques are used to improve the students’ presentation skills. The course is designed to motivate the students to improve their presentations through practice-discussion-modification cycle. By introducing presentation practice sessions, the students’ grades for presentations increase up to 7.7%. At the end of the course, 65% of the students find the presentation practice sessions are very useful. Most of the students are able to give presentations with confidence. Moreover, 54% of them say giving technical presentations is enjoyable. Considering the students are not willing to prepare presentations at the beginning of this course, the majority of the students largely change their attitude towards technical presentations by taking this course. In this paper, the techniques used at JAD program to improve the students’ presentation skills are discussed. The stress is on how to motivate the students to practice presentations so that they can improve their presentations by themselves. These techniques can be applied to improve technical presentation skills in any languages.