Teacher-2-TEACHER

Toastmasters' skills in class

TIMOTHY CORNWALL, PHD, DTM

Over the last 10 years, and as a Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM), I have gained many benefits from Toastmasters International - a non-profit organisation that helps people develop communication and leadership skills through public speaking.

Removing verbal ticks

A new toastmaster goes through 10 projects that develop basic skills needed to make a good speech. At this time, one major focus is to help speakers learn to drop annoying, and often very distracting, voiced pauses like "uhmm" and "ahhh", and other words or phrases that, through overuse, distract attention, like "you know", "okay", "like" and "so".

It is very difficult to avoid "verbal ticks", and once one set is abolished, another set often appears. However, if they become distractions due to too many voiced pauses, or become overused expressions, they can take away from a teacher's core message and make it that much more difficult to help students learn.

A basic teaching example of an overworked word is "okay," used to mean, among other things, "yes", "I understand" and "good", and as a marker to signal moving from one thing to the next, as in "Okay, class, let's move on to ... ."

If you have any doubts as to the extent to which voiced verbal pauses can distract from a message, compare live interviews on CNN - which are filled with voiced pauses - and those on BBC - which have relatively few. Then, record your own lesson and listen for any verbal ticks you might have that could be distracting from your message and work to remove them one by one.

It will not be easy, but a key point to keep in mind is that when teaching, unvoiced pauses, while initially difficult to accomplish, have more impact, and unlike in a conversation, are not a turn-taking signal but rather a time for both you and the student to think about what you have just said.

The 70-30 rule

Even in an ideal world, where we talk 30 percent and students talk 70 percent, in a three-hour class, we may talk for almost an hour. If our talk includes nervous verbal and physical ticks that distract from our message, it should not be a mystery as to why some, if not all, of the students stop listening.

Evaluating student work

Another key idea for Toastmasters is to give effective evaluations that highlight a speaker's strengths using examples and to highlight what needs improving by offering concrete ideas that could prove useful.

In making these evaluations, we use the "sandwich method": you did this well, this could be better, you did this well. If an evaluator follows this format and if concrete examples are provided for the strong points and concrete suggestions for a weak area, not only the individual being evaluated, but also other members of the audience/class benefit.

To follow this pattern, find at least two strong points for every point the student could improve on. Experienced and comfortable using this format, I find students react very favourably to evaluations and are eager to try again as they know my evaluation will be pleasant and not painful. Too often in class, we focus on the negative and forget to praise students for the positive.

By removing nervous verbal ticks and pauses, we can enhance the message students will hear, which can only be a plus. In addition, if students know that evaluations will praise and recommend ideas, and not criticise, my experience has been that they look forward to and actively seek evaluation opportunities.

In addition, other students learn from what the speaker did well and can incorporate positive aspects while avoiding potential weaknesses mentioned about a previous speaker.

Dr Timothy Cornwall has been teaching EFL for 30 years and is part of the Shinawatra University faculty. Co-founder of Thailand Educators Network, he can be reached through thaiednet.org , through his web site speechwork.co.th , at tim@speechwork.co.th or on 081-834-8982.

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