Developing Tsuru University's English Speech Syllabus
By Charles Arthur Paxton
(Submitted for Tsuru Bunka University's Journal October 2002, publication date March 2003)
Introduction
Brent Wolter developed a sound syllabus for speech elective courses in Tsuru`s Department of English in academic year 1998-1999. This paper briefly describes developments in my pedagogical praxis that I have made in Tsuru`s Speech courses since I began teaching them in 2000. My claim to knowledge is founded upon communications with Wolter, my reading of his paper ( 2000), experiences at Tsuru itself (2000-2002), and concurrent work at Chuo and Hosei universities. I hope that it will interest those who are currently teaching, or would like to teach English Speech courses in the Japanese university context or English courses that contain public speaking elements. It also serves as an informative update to any readers who might be interested in the speech course developments since Brent Wolter`s (Nov. 28,2000) article. I shall describe why, how, and to what extent I have retained what I consider to be the best elements of Wolter`s course design and how and why I have implemented changes.
Wolter described the syllabus as a work in progress and it was essentially sound, but limited by deficiencies in the core text. In brief, my innovations include reducing the group sizes, increasing the scope of peer evaluation, abandoning cue cards, reducing emphasis on rote memorization and increasing emphasis on developing voice control, including a new focus on pace. The most significant change has been in the development of the written discourse, the verbal content itself, with the inclusion of templates that encourage logical development of ideas, expression of informed opinion using sourced evidence to support argument, concise relevant summaries and effective conclusions in academic speeches. Finally I will briefly identify progress areas that I feel require further attention in the future.
Evolution In The Tsuru Speech Curriculum.
In designing the syllabus Wolter identified speech as a hybrid discursive activity with characteristics of both written and spoken discourse, reliant upon skills that cannot be developed in the absence of practice. (Wolter 2000, 99) Consequently his curriculum design reflected a "reasonable balance" of exercises and activities to develop both discursive skill areas. The areas of "spoken discourse considered to be most important for effective public speaking namely speech posture, eye contact, speech gestures and voice inflection" and the written structures of "introduction, body and conclusion which typifies Western rhetorical writing." (ibid.)
Wolter also identified increasing the students' levels of confidence as a valuable outcome. He selected Speaking of Speech (Harrington and LeBeau) as the core textbook for the course.
Wolter's syllabus was essentially based upon this very practical textbook and is divisible into three main stages. The first focuses on developing the spoken discursive skills, posture, eye contact, gestures and inflection. The second focuses upon developing basic written discourse skills and combining them with the speaking skills to produce structured speeches. The final phase incorporates additional structure for sequencing and summarizing and culminates in longer personal speech projects that demonstrate all the skills developed in the course. In personal communication he praised the good teaching conditions, students' positive attitude and willingness to participate.
However he described the teaching as very labor intensive especially in terms of frequent grammar correction and assessments. He wanted to increase the element of peer assessment and introduce a focus on pace in the future. (Ibid, 105) In academic year 2000-2001, as a novice, I adopted Wolter's syllabus without changes and I enjoyed the teaching even though the constant correction and assessment in the large classes was very tiring and time consuming. Like Wolter, I put the students in groups of six and arranged the desks to facilitate eye contact. I found the text book to be particularly good for the first two phases, the task based exercises developed the speaking skill areas gradually, drawing upon the students' extant knowledge and personal lives very nicely with presentations on their hometowns, bed rooms, a demonstration of a personal skill or activity, information about a world famous land mark, a cookery demonstration and a comparison of two products. However the last phase rapidly became wearisome as the textbook demanded increased repetition of the main ideas in the introduction, then with each main idea in the body and then again in the conclusion. The idea behind this was presumably that the repetition would aid audience comprehension in low level classes. However students who had included a lot of ideas in their speeches were effectively being penalized for their dedication and sophistication.
Some simpler speeches were attaining better marks on the technical side because the speaker could devote more effort to the technical polish because their speeches were shorter and contained less ideas. For the more ambitious students their final speeches had become an "ordeal by rote memorization". The students scored very highly, but I felt that many suffered unduly. I also felt that the grading needed to reflect the considerable difference in quality of thought that went into the final speeches. The textbook is very technocentric and my grading system reflected this focus on structure and delivery skills.
Changes implemented in 2001
Now that I had a year's experience and knew of the students' academic level and above all their blessed willingness to do what I asked of them, I doubted the appropriacy of some of the text book's later exercises and for the 2001-2002 academic year I implemented some major changes. First I varied the group sizes from Wolter's six people in a group to just three or four, and revolved them from group to group more often. In doing so I cut out Wolter`s question and answer phase (101) in favor of more detailed peer feed back. As I was checking everybody's written discourse to ensure the best quality anyway, it seemed more important to spend time between the speeches on improving the feedback to raise the standard of the spoken discourse.
This increased student speech practice time and gave more time for the peer feedback that Wolter had wanted to develop further (104 ). I considered the disadvantage of more movement and noise in the classroom to be outweighed by the advantages of more speaking time and more time for feed-back. In the field of public speaking practice does make perfect. The essence of this learning process is personal experience. Imitation and then innovation, reflection upon action through peer and teacher assessment and then adjusted future action. The gradual increase in confidence stems from perception of success in gradually more demanding tasks.
As a regular judge at the All YMCA annual speech contests I am impressed by the fact that the entrants and winners tended to be returnees or 'A' students who had had some experience abroad. There was a clear demarcation between those who had skills and confidence who participated and those who lacked them and did not. In my teaching I wanted to make effective public speaking in English less exclusive, but I was unsure quite where to begin in my classes. I began with facilitating improvements in the written discourse.
In my concurrent work for the Chuo law and Hosei economics faculties' discussion and presentation classes in academic year 2000-2001 I was required in one year to raise the studentsí level to a standard where they could discuss and make an academic presentation on a social, legal, economic or environmental issue at a foreign university. Quite the hardest pedagogical challenge that I have ever faced. There are no text books for this and I felt my way forward developing my own materials with the assistance of feedback from Stephen Hesse and Michael Nix at Chuo and Stella Yamazaki at Hosei.
In my first year I learned the value of using templates and a positively reinforcing assessment system to improve the base-line standard of the written discourse. In academic year 2001-2002 I made success in this difficult field less exclusive. I began by considering all the fundamental ingredients of a successful written discourse. An 'A' grade written discourse in the Western rhetorical paradigm requires the following elements:
Introduction
Personal introduction
Topic introduction
Thesis Statement
Main Body
Opinion Argument
Supporting evidence
Conclusion
Summary
Conclusion
Powerful finishing statement / thought provoking rhetorical question.
Provided that the grammar is correct, the opinions and argument non-contradictory and relevant evidence is cited from an identified and respected source, and the oral delivery is comprehensible then the Japanese student can expect to receive a positive assessment in a foreign university context. The student will not be required to deliver the speech by rote memory, so effectively it is a public reading. After imitation of a minimalist model presentation my students were required to apply the model to topics of their own choice.
The correlation between the quality of the students' output and the quality of my materials and class management became increasingly clear and my second year syllabus was emergent and highly improved in the second semester with the use of Issue Analysis sheets (Paxton. Issue Analysis Sheet) and check lists for students to refer to when researching and writing (Paxton. Checklist). This raised the base-line quality of the research and structuring, reduced repetitious instruction and enabled fairer more systematic teacher to student feedback.
I took advantage of the tendency for Japanese university undergraduate students to be results-oriented to improve the base-line quality of the spoken discourse. I introduced more detailed peer and teacher assessment sheets that enforced allocation of marks for specific skill areas explicitly reinforcing the importance of confidence, fluency, accuracy, intonation, pronunciation, and style. This was still very crude and left "gray areas" that were subjectively uncomfortable, for example what is good fluency comprised of? In what proportions should the style points be divided between eye contact, posture, gesture and voice control?
It was clear that I should make the assessment areas more specific in order for the feedback to be more meaningful and easier. The difficulty of assessing both the written and spoken discourse simultaneously became more intense as the quality of the work improved. The mental effort of assessing the written and spoken discursive elements required high degrees of concentration and was thoroughly exhausting on such a large scale. There was simply too much to focus upon at once.
To relieve this mental burden I have divided the assessments in academic year 2002-2003. The written discourse is assessed first in the grammar checking phase of each speech project by use of an explicit checklist that enables every student to see how and why their marks are being allocated ( Paxton. Check list). I then give them have a chance to return to the research and writing to correct deficiencies. This has significantly enhanced learner autonomy.
The discourses still need grammar checking, but student independence has increased considerably and this has reduced one-to-one teacher correction time and ensures fair correction attention for all students regardless of the teacher's varying levels of fatigue. The spoken discourse evaluation sheet has also become more explicit for academic year 2002-2003 dividing Fluency into Flow and Pace, style into Inflection, Rhythm and Intonation.(Paxton. Score Sheet )
There is one sheet for the teacher's record that records the total score for the presentation and a more detailed tear-off receipt that explicitly shows how the marks have been allocated and reveals strength and weakness areas to facilitate the student's reflexive improvement. In preparation for academic year 2001-2002 I decided to drop the text book in favor of oral instruction and computer print out model speeches for task-based activities. This would not only save the students some money, but would cut out the waiting period for texts at the beginning of the year and ensure more heads up in class activities throughout the year.
I used the previous year's syllabus for the first two phases, but I exchanged the product comparison speech and personal speech in the final phase for a Student Life speech with visual aid and a longer academic speech on any social or environmental issue of the student's choice. The extra time was usefully employed in focusing upon intonation and variation in pace. Skill areas that were ignored by the text book. As Wolter points out (105) the use of cue cards had been disappointing. I abandoned them and allowed the use of a paper in the speech so that students would not be burdened with memorization, but could concentrate on their speaking skills.
The results were very impressive, they could afford to be more ambitious in their written discourse so that was an improvement area and they were able to devote more of their mental faculties to inflection, intonation and variation of pace. I bought and issued OHP slides for their final academic presentation and they used the TV display effectively. The need for eye contact required students to balance their attentions between their audience and their paper. Students no longer rolled their eyes heavenwards in search of forgotten lines. I taught them to use their thumb as a moving place marker so that they could return their eyes to the correct place in their text between eye contact.
This year I developed a sheet that enabled peer scoring and my scoring to be viewed for comparison by the students in order for the peer scoring to gradually become more accurate and uniform from group to group. Peer assessment was for information only and the grading was based only upon teacher assessment.
Upon reflection I was satisfied with my implementations, but made the following observations. There was a need for an improved assessment system to speed up the process in order for speeches to be assessed in one class period or to recognize that some students had had more time for practice than others.
Developments in 2002-2003
In preparation for academic year 2002-2003 I used the previous year's syllabus supplemented with computer print out model speeches for task-based activities. I tried to retain all the best elements of Wolter's Syllabus through the first and second phases not wanting to reinvent the wheel, but building on the success of the student life project of 2001 I introduced a Student Life speech in the first semester that used a template to introduce the structural elements of academic written discourse (Paxton. Bar graph, Line graph and Pie Chart). These had worked very well at Hosei in 2001.
The Tsuru students wrote their own research question, researched it, collated their data, structured it within the template and delivered the speech using a bar or line graph or pie chart as a visual aid. Typical questions were ìHow much do I spend on food in a weekî or ìHow much time do I study each subjectî. The results were relevant for fellow students, impressive to witness and time saving. In one project I had introduced the structural concepts that the text book had tediously drawn out over three chapters. Perhaps more importantly I had introduced the research, collation and presentation of real world data in an academically acceptable format. These are skill areas ignored in the text book.
For the feed-back to be more meaningful this year, I felt that their peer scoring had to be reflected to some degree in my grading system however Wolter (105) points out the need for a nonthreatening system because students are uncomfortable to give feedback that could be perceived by their friends as negative criticism. In 2001 I noted that some groups were being very strict while others were being overgenerous. I resolved to retain my dual score sheet that allowed peer assessment and teacher assessment to be easily comparable but this year I decided to add the averaged peer score to my score and divide by two to determine the result for my grade book. This three hundred and sixty degree feedback system seems to be working quite well because in most cases my assessment score matches the averaged peer score quite closely.
Only in rare cases has the peer score seemed overgenerous, more often I have felt the students to be a little mean in their scoring. Assessment time still carries over into two periods though, the large class sizes make this inevitable. I have not yet devised an explicit compensation system to award a bonus to those who have one week less preparation time, but I expect a slightly higher polish from the later speeches and am a little more strict in their assessment.
I am introducing a new grade sheet this semester that has enough spaces for writing and averaging the peer scores over several rounds of practice. (Paxton. Score Sheet.)
The second semester syllabus this year develops both discursive areas through a demonstration speech, news reading, and a final full-length academic speech on a social, economic, political or environmental topic of the studentsí individual choice with use of visual aids.
In the previous two years the demonstration speech was made at the end of the first semester. This year I had them prepare it fully before the summer vacation for delivery in the first class of the second semester. This would allow ample time for memorization of a corrected written discourse. This is the only speech in the course that I have asked the students to memorize. This speech relies heavily on gestures and other physical movement which prevents reference to notes.
The news reading speech is an innovation this year that has worked well with the Hosei intensive course and Chuo Law students. It complements the demonstration speech which heavily exercises posture and gestures, by placing all the stress upon good voice control. First they have to construct clear concise topic sentences from information given to them, the journalistsí essential ìWho, Where, When, What and Whyî details. This develops the concept of the need for concise but detailed topic sentences. Then they research five news stories of their own choice from the media and deliver a news reading.
The reading exercises voice control skills to the utmost and finely polishes pace variation and intonation skills. I ask the students to experiment with intonation patterns and select their preferred pattern for each sentence marking it on their paper in a wave shape with a highlighter pen. I then approve or correct their patterns as need be so that they can practice with confidence.
As in 2001 the final project incorporates and demonstrates all the skills that the students have developed over the course in a showcase academic speech. This year I put some speeches from 2001 on the web so that students can see some of last year's work. I was extremely proud of their efforts and development last year and have every reason to expect the same this year.
Conclusion Highlighting Areas For Further Improvement.
The syllabus is still a work in progress. I am pleased with the developments so far and feel that I have addressed many of the improvement areas that Wolter identified along with those of my own identification.
However there is still room for improvement in my class management. I feel that abandoning the text book in favor of tuition by demonstration and example penalizes students who miss classes. I therefore find myself having to repeat a rushed version of the essential tuition to absentees rather than being able to simply refer them to the page numbers for self study.
They are entitled to miss three classes per semester and this is not unreasonable. I will try instituting a study buddy system in which every student is paired with another whom they are to officially contact in order to catch up with missed instruction or for photocopies before the next class. Absence from school should not license a two week break from homework.
My web based URL links library to media sources (Paxton. Links Library) is less useful than I had expected. I had not anticipated the low level of computer literacy, let alone access in my students. I had expected more students to be familiar with internet research and have access to a computer, but the predominance of the mobile phone and its comparatively limited internet enablement has co-opted and eclipsed the more useful interaction that computers offer the researcher.
I have asked the computer literate students with passwords to assist the others in their online research, but much of the research this year will still be conducted the old-fashioned way. I think it would be useful for every speech student to enroll on the computer literacy course in the first semester in order for them to be capable of on-line research by the second semester.
Yes, the syllabus is still a work in progress. I am pleased with the progress made so far in raising the base-line quality of the public speaking and feel that I have addressed many of the improvement areas that Wolter identified along with those of my own identification.
Admittedly the graduating students are not completely independent public speakers. The grammar checking is an essential component to ensure quality in the written discourse. I feel that over the period of a year of study the course does develop all the basic skills for sound public speaking in English. If there is any measure of success for a speech course it must surely be the extent of developments in students' skills, accomplishments and confidence between April of one year and February of the next. Of all the courses that I teach, the Tsuru speech classes rank very highly in terms of the extent of tangible personal development.
Harrington, D. and LeBeau C. (1996) Speaking of Speech. MacMillan Language House.
Paxton, C. (2002) Bar Graph (http://www2.gol.com/users/chapa/cphomepage/university/barchart.html) Issue Analysis Sheets (http://www2.gol.com/users/chapa/cphomepage/university/issueanalysis.html)
Line Graph (http://www2.gol.com/users/chapa/cphomepage/university/linechart.html)
Links library (http://www2.gol.com/users/chapa/cphomepage/university/intlinksjapan.html)
Model Presentation Structure (http://www2.gol.com/users/chapa/cphomepage/university/presentstructure.html )
Pie Chart (http://www2.gol.com/users/chapa/cphomepage/university/piechart.html)
Presentation Checklist (http://www2.gol.com/users/chapa/cphomepage/university/presentcl.html)
Score Sheet (http://www2.gol.com/users/chapa/cphomepage/university/aspeechgrade.html)
Wolter, B. (2000) Considerations in developing a syllabus for speech. Tsuru Studies in Linguistics and Literature. Volume 28.Pp.96-105. Tsuru University Association of English Literature.