Giving Academic Presentations provides guidance on academic-style presentations for university students. A goal of the text is to make presenters aware that giving an effective academic presentation requires mastery of a broad range of skills.

The presentation genres addressed in the book are: making introductions, describing and comparing objects, explaining a process, defining a concept, and giving a problem-solution speech. Among the many academic skills and concepts addressed in the book are:

• Examination of major speech types and the accompanying organizational strategies
• Discussion of speech overviews and suggestions for designing them and creating visuals to accompany them
• Suggestions for speaker-listener interaction including checking for understanding, soliciting questions from the audience, preparing for and responding to questions, and interrupting the speaker to ask questions or request clarification
• Discussion of the importance of using evidence in academic speaking and the advantages of using certain types of evidence
• Suggestions of ways to qualify claims and strategies for making weaker or stronger claims
• Strategies and practice to improve pausing, stress, and intonation

This book is more than a collection of activities or ready-made lesson plans to add to a teaching repertoire. Instead, Goal-Driven Lesson Planning is intended to empower teachers and help them create a principled framework for their teaching—a framework that will shape the varied activities of the ESL classroom into a coherent teaching and learning partnership. After reading this book, teachers and prospective teachers will be able to articulate their individual teaching philosophies.
 
Goal-Driven Lesson Planning shows readers how to take any piece from English language materials—an assigned text, a random newspaper article, an ESL activity from a website, etc.—and use it to teach students something about language. Readers are walked through the process of reflecting on their role in diagnosing what that “something” is—what students really need—and planning how to get them there and how to know when they got there in a goal-driven principled manner.
 
This book has chapters on the theory of setting specific language goals for students; how to analyze learner needs (including an initial diagnostic and needs-analysis); templates to use when planning goal-driven English language lessons; explicit instruction on giving corrective feedback;  how to recognize and assess student progress; and the mechanics and logistics that facilitate the goal-driven language classroom.