front cover of Giving Academic Presentations
Giving Academic Presentations
Susan M. Reinhart
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Giving Academic Presentations provides guidance on academic-style presentations for ESL students and native speakers. One goal of this text is to make presenters aware that giving an effective presentation requires mastery of a broad range of skills. Students will learn how to choose an appropriate topic, create effective visuals, and design a speech opening.

 This textbook provides:
*helpful analyses of speeches
*examination of major speech types, accompanying organizational strategies, and related language use
*tips for improving nonverbal behavior
*suggestions for speaker-listener interaction
*an analysis of ways to qualify claims and strategies for improving them
*opportunities for evaluating one's work and the work of others.
 
[more]

front cover of Giving Academic Presentations, Second Edition
Giving Academic Presentations, Second Edition
Susan M. Reinhart
University of Michigan Press, 2013

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
  • Practical advice about preparing and practicing speeches
  • Opportunities for presenters to evaluate their own and others’ work

 The Second Edition includes many new tasks and additional speeches; more attention to working with and using visuals; information about computer projection and using PowerPoint; and new sections on presenting biographical information, referring to handouts, and giving research presentations.
 

[more]

front cover of The Grammar Answer Key
The Grammar Answer Key
Short Explanations to 100 ESL Questions
Keith S. Folse
University of Michigan Press, 2018
The Grammar Answer Key is a collection of 100 questions submitted by ESL teachers--both novice and experienced and both native and non-native speakers--from many different countries around the world. The questions are real questions that ESL/EFL students have asked teachers about English and are similar to the Hot Seat Questions presented in Keys to Teaching Grammar to English Language Learners, 2nd ed. (Folse, 2016). 

The 100 questions are organized into 12 chapters on topics that teachers and students can relate to well: adjectives, articles, clauses, connectors, gerunds and infinitives, prepositions, pronouns, pronunciation, subject-verb agreement, suffixes, verbs, and vocabulary-grammar connections. The number of questions in each chapter ranges from 3 to 13 and is based on the questions submitted. Each chapter begins with a short overview of the topic that features key terminology and a chart explaining three common ESL errors. 

Each question is presented in a box and is followed by an "answer" that can inform instruction, often in chart format. Examples of questions are:
  • How do you know if a word is an adjective?              
  • Can I say the Monday or the January?
  • Do you say  on July or in July?
  • I received an email from someone that said “Greetings from my wife and I.” Is this right? Why?
  • How do I know which way to pronounce the -ed at the end of a word?
  • Which verb tenses are the most common in English? Which ones should I study?
  • Why do you say turn on the light instead of turn the light?
  • In my language, we have one word for make and do. In English, when should I use make and when should I use do? 

The book is the ideal teacher resource and professional development tool. 
[more]

front cover of Grammar Lessons
Grammar Lessons
Translating a Life in Spain
Michele Morano
University of Iowa Press, 2007
In the thirteen personal essays in Grammar Lessons, Michele Morano connects the rules of grammar to the stories we tell to help us understand our worlds. Living and traveling in Spain during a year of teaching English to university students, she learned to translate and interpret her past and present worlds—to study the surprising moments of communication—as a way to make sense of language and meaning, longing and memory.
    Morano focuses first on her year of living in Oviedo, in the early 1990s, a time spent immersing herself in a new culture and language while working through the relationship she had left behind with an emotionally dependent and suicidal man. Next, after subsequent trips to Spain, she explores the ways that travel sparks us to reconsider our personal histories in the context of larger historical legacies. Finally, she turns to the aftereffects of travel, to the constant negotiations involved in retelling and understanding the stories of our lives. Throughout she details one woman’s journey through vocabulary and verb tense toward a greater sense of her place in the world.
    Grammar Lessons illustrates the difficulty and delight, humor and humility of living in a new language and of carrying that pivotal experience forward. Michele Morano’s beautifully constructed essays reveal the many grammars and many voices that we collect, and learn from, as we travel.
[more]

front cover of Great Debates
Great Debates
Language and Culture Skills for ESL Students
Meredith Westfall and John McCarthy
University of Michigan Press, 2004

This book provides vocabulary, conversation tips, language learning tips, and discussion activities to help students debate on a wide variety of fairly non-controversial topics, from dining in or eating out, using the phone or e-mail, type A or type B, fiction or non-fiction, love at first sight or love over time, to diet or exercise.
Along with the discussion activities, the book contains some reading, writing, and vocabulary activities.
Each of the 30 units includes:
pre-debate discussion questions
new vocabulary words
a reading that outlines both sides of the debate
comprehension questions
discussion activities that include expressions used in debate-related speech acts and those pertaining to language learning
writing assignments
idiom and vocabulary review.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter