Abstract
Effective oral presentation skills are becoming increasingly important for engineers and scientists, but in Japan, traditionally messages are often conveyed implicitly and listeners are expected to be responsible to understand the content. When presenting to audiences with various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, speakers should be responsible for conveying messages to help the audiences to understand the content effectively. Therefore, making conscious efforts to change the listener-responsible style to speaker-responsible style is very important for Japanese students to be successful presenters in a global society. A new approach to presentation, called the Assertion-Evidence approach, can be a powerful tool to guide speakers convey message effectively while helping audience comprehend and retain the content. In this paper, we explain what the AE approach is and how the use of this approach help Japanese students deliver effective presentations. This approach is characterized by three main features: building talks on messages not topics, supporting those messages with visual evidence, and delivering the talk by forming sentences on the spot (but after practice).
