Speaking skills are perhaps the most difficult to acquire when learning a new language, and my Legal English students have often said that giving a formal presentation is the most difficult of all. I put together these Guidelines for their use, and I’m posting them here in case they may prove useful to others. At the end there is a “Rate Yourself” chart for assessing overall effectiveness.

Guidelines for Giving a Presentation in English

BEFORE YOUR PRESENTATION

• Define your audience
• Plan the content
• Use your own words
• Prepare handouts or other visual aids
• DO NOT USE GOOGLE TRANSLATE OR SIMILAR APPS to prepare your presentation (the results may be a disaster!)

DURING YOUR PRESENTATION

• Keep it simple
• Follow a clear structure
• Look directly at your audience
• Project your voice
• DO NOT READ

USEFUL LANGUAGE

1. Introducing your topic

• This morning/today…
• I’m going to talk about…
• I’d like to describe…
• The topic of my presentation is…
• This morning I’d like to give you an overview of…
• The theme of my talk is…
• My presentation this morning concerns…
• This afternoon I would like to talk to you about…
• I will be examining the following areas…
• This presentation focuses on the issue of…

2. Preliminary outline of your presentation

• First,/Second,/Then,/After that,/Finally,
• I’d like to… deal with…/move on to…/focus on…/consider…
• First, I’m going to look at …
• Second, I’ll move on to the issue of …
• Then I’ll examine …
• Lastly/Finally, I’ll look at / focus on …
• My presentation is divided into/I’ve divided my talk into… (three/four parts…)
• I have divided my talk into the following main areas: …
• I am going to divide my presentation into two main parts. First I’m going to describe… and then I’ll move on to look at …

3. Referring to questions

• Feel free to interrupt me if you have a question.
• If you don’t mind, we’ll leave questions until the end.

4. Introducing each section

• Let’s start with… (objectives)
• First we’re going to look at…
• I’d like to begin by…
• Now I’d like to focus on…
• I’d like to mention three points here…
• Now let’s move on to … (the next part)
• Let’s turn our attention to… (the question of…)
• This leads me to… (my third point…)
• Finally… (let’s consider…)

5. Making reference to other sections of the presentation

• As I mentioned earlier…
• I’ll say more about this later.
• I’ll come back to this point later.

6. Referring to common knowledge

• As you know…
• As you may recall/remember…

7. Referring to visual aids (handouts, powerpoints, etc.)

• This chart/outline/etc. shows/represents…
• If you look at this chart/table/etc….
• I’d like to draw your attention to this diagram/chart/table/etc….
• The data here shows that…

8. Summarizing main points and making conclusions

• To summarize, (there are five key points…)
• In conclusion,…
• To conclude my presentation, I would like to…

RATE YOURSELF

How was your presentation?

	Excellent	Good	OK	Poor
System -organization -knowledge of topic -introduction -ending -connections -relevance -length -level
Manner -audience contact -interest -assurance -confidence
Body Language -stance -posture -hands -eye contact -movement -facial expression
Visual aids -number -design -relevance -usefulness
Overall impression