PechaKucha: a strategy to consider in teaching speaking skills

Hello steemians,

It has been at least 5 days of non productive mode on steemit. I am pretty busy with my teaching schedules on campus. Therefore, I did not have enough time to write here. So, here I am again. This evening, I would like to discuss one of my class activities during this semester. It is PechaKucha presentation.

This semester, I am teaching a class of public speaking for 35 of 4th semester students. I learnt about Pechakucha last year year when I was in a language training in Bali, Indonesia. My teacher asked students to prepare slides but it was called Pechakucha. I never heard about it before. Since then, I start to learn and watch Pechakucha presentations on its website. Sound that the strategy is very interesting to apply in my class with my students. I am quite sure that students would find weird and confused but they would workd hard.

What is PechaKucha?

[PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images] (http://www.pechakucha.org/faq).

Basically, the technique is almost similar to normal presentation using powerpoint BUT here, we are set by the time. We are timed and restricted in term of slide numbers. The timing is quite an interesting way of training or practice of speaking. The speaker is more likely need to prepare very well. PechaKucha is only a model of presenting but the common rules and engagements are similar.

In a public speaking presentation, I believe the speaker needs to consider several basic requirements:

1. Slides should be interesting, not monotonous, pictures included, not full text.
2. Preparation/practice should be sometime before the action.
3. Self confident should be improved.
4. The Venue/stage should be inspected or known.
5. Audience should be not problem.

In most cases of public speaking or presentation, the speaker suffer from self confident and nervousness. These two major internal problems are suffered by most people when they talk in public. It is very common and unavoidable.

PechaKucha is I believed a good strategy to train students speaking skills. At first, it is very hard but by practices, pechakucha will help to improve students speaking skills. Through 20x20, slides and seconds, students are designed to perform all the personal speaking skills. It is not easy but it may be easy after practices.

PechaKucha will be able to train students in terms of:

1. Self control;
2. Stage management;
3. Rhythm and tone of voice;
4. Body languages; and
5. The speaker-audiences interaction.

These are some crucial aspects involved during the public speaking. Applying pechakucha is one way to train students in improving these basic skills in mastering speaking. During the pechakucha presentation, students are required to speaking fluent but not fast. Timing for 20 seconds is not long but not short also. Students need to make sure the contents of the explanation to cover the 20 seconds.

Practice is the key using the pechakucha strategy. The interaction should be well maintained between the speaker and audience. Although timing highly pressures the speaker, but he or she should manage the contact properly.

So, succeeding the pechakucha presentation will improve the quality of speaker speaking skills. The restricted times and slides demands speakers to understand the basic concept of common public speaking. Although confident and body languages are strongly important, but other speaking skills may not be ignored. To succeed in public speaking, students are highly recommended to adopt pechakucha as their training way/practice.

Regards,

@khairilrazali
(a lecturer and researcher)

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