By Carolin Schneider and Gilly Langley - Leeds Language Zone

The University of Leeds is investing heavily into supporting internationalisation in a meaningful way and enhancing the student experience by developing skills, improving employability and promoting intercultural understanding. Part of the Language Centre, the Language Zone offers students help with language learning and is a safe place to meet other learners. Apart from improving language skills, cultural awareness and confidence, regular attendees develop intercultural relationships and find new ways to learn together. In this hands-on workshop we presented one of the many activities that are run in the Language Zone to support these strategic aims, “Presenting with Confidence”. The activity is based on the popular PowerPoint Karaoke, or Battledecks, format, and requires participants to improvise by challenging them to deliver a presentation based on a set of PowerPoint slides that they have never seen before. This encourages students to improve their presentation skills and confidence in public speaking in a fun and relaxed way, learning to share strengths and weaknesses to their mutual benefit. Staff are on hand to give feedback and encourage more reluctant students to “give it a go”.

During a term some students will attend one or more sessions, and we will get to know students who come to the same sessions every week and usually observe improvements in their language skills, cultural awareness and confidence.

Our workshop at the Language Centre Summer Conference was attended by a small but dedicated group of colleagues who very willingly participated in the activity.

After each workshop participant had presented once, the group developed new ways of using the presentation slides, such as presenting in a team of four, meaning that each person got to present one slide (25 seconds) rather than four slides (1 minute). This created a useful icebreaker activity, using the slides in ways we which we had not considered before.

Having seen teachers new to the activity develop new ways of using the materials within a very short timeframe was interesting and has made us think about how we could develop new ways of using the materials and how the activity may be re-structured.

We also felt that running a session at this conference created another opportunity to interact with teaching staff who do not usually engage with the Language Zone offer and therefore often do not tell their students enough about how the Language Zone can support them in their studies and language development. Having engaged the teachers during this workshop has brought home that attending Language Centre events like this is something we need to do throughout the year, in addition to other efforts of raising awareness of our resources, activities and expertise, as we need the buy-in from teaching staff to deliver the best possible services and experience to students, both in the Language Centre and the wider campus community.

To find out more about the Language Zone, please visit Casebook@Leeds. Examples of presentations available on request.