The capstone project will give you opportunities to demonstrate your competence in the learning objectives for this Specialization. For the project, you’ll use formal, written methods and more casual visual and audio methods of communication to demonstrate your ability to use language appropriate for different business contexts. The goal of this course is to demonstrate competence in writing and presenting a plan using skills and language appropriate for business. Course Learning Objectives • Use appropriate vocabulary to write a mini business plan • Communicate a business plan orally in an organized and engaging presentation
Video: Giving Effective Presentations
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From the course by University of Washington
Business English: Capstone Project
31 ratings
University of Washington
31 ratings
Course 5 of 5 in the Specialization Business English Communication Skills
From the lesson
Week 3: Business Plans
In Week 3, we will review business plans and then introduce you to the concept of a mini-business plan for your final project.
Meet the Instructors
Richard MooreExtension Lecturer, International & English Language Programs
UW Educational Outreach
[MUSIC]
Hi, I'm Matt McGarrity.
I'm a principal lecturer in the Department of Communication
at the University of Washington.
I teach public speaking, argumentation, rhetoric.
I designed an Introduction to Public Speaking course, a MOOC.
it's run on Coursera and edX and it's had a million enrollees to date.
It's hard to say that there's a single mistake that everybody makes, but I will
say that when I work with students and when I work with clients, what I really
try to get them to do is do presentations more like they engage in conversation, and
I mean that in terms of how they relate to the audience and how they sound.
Certainly there are certain times when highly scripted,
highly practiced, really polished speeches are called for.
But for most of us the day to day presentations,
our workplace presentations, would benefit a lot more if we spoke the way we speak.
Probably the biggest challenge I think non-native speakers have
is one of prosody.
Now prosody is a term that describes all the things that's going
on when you speak besides the words and the syntax.
So prosody is stuff like speaker rate and pitch and stress, these sorts of things.
And they help us as listeners predict what you're going to say.
They help us understand what you're trying to say and
of course I also change meaning.
So in English of course there's big difference between I
didn't say that and I didn't say that, right?
Those are the exact same words and the exact same order but
very different meanings.
Now, prosody is really difficult for non-native speakers.
I was a student in Russia, and I never got Russian prosody right.
But we know this, and there's been a wealth of research into prosody and
even in fact into non-native speakers of English and English prosody.
I was reading a study earlier this week.
And it was research into international TAs here in the US.
We'll have people come and
study at American universities from all over the world.
And while they're here getting a masters or
PhD they might have an opportunity to teach an American class.
And so depending on the university you'll have
A nonnative of English in front of a primarily English speaking audience.
So there's one study that look at this and what some of those challenges were.
Well, they found that the international TAs and nonnative speakers of English had
a lot of problems with prosity and in fact it made it difficult for
some native English speakers to understand them.
Specifically, non-native speakers weren't really providing intonational units.
So these small chunks, these phrases.
This is an intonation unit, but then again, so is this.
So they weren't providing those sort of phrases, those phrase breaks.
Also many non-native speakers of English had a narrower pitch ranges.
So they weren't raising and lowering their pitch as much as is common in English.
So that's the problem.
What to do about it?
Well It varies, one of the easiest things actually came from that same research
study and says what the problem is, pitch modulation in English.
One thing you can do is just practice pitch modulation.
It's really easy.
And you get a pitch program You can get them on your phones, right?
You can get them on your phone.
You speak into your phone.
It gives you a nice little spectrograph.
And, as you practice, you can try to increase that pitch modulation, okay?
That's one thing to practice.
The other thing I think is a little bit more challenging but more important maybe,
and that's don't focus so much on words, focus more on phrases.
So when I'll work with non-native speakers, I'll be coaching them, and
I'm listening to them, I think, depending on their fluency with English, the focus
is much more on the word, they're trying to think, what do I want to say,
what's that word in English and so they are playing out each word in sequence.
The result is the pros that he cues kind of drop out.
So if am listening they end up talking
more at the level of the word.
And that's hard to listened to.
Why? Because I don't hear individual words.
I want to hear entire phrases.
You speak into level word.
I want to hear total phrases that's clustering together of like ideas.
So my advice to them is I say, hey, put the pauses between phrases.
Don't put them between words.
That's really tough.
That requires getting better at English.
But, if you had a choice between fluidity,
having pauses between phrases instead of words.
And getting grammar wrong or words wrong, choose the fluidity.
Why? Because as an English speaker,
I can hear past a wrong word.
I can hear around bad grammar, but it is a lot more difficult for
me to follow along If you're not speaking in these phrases,
that naturally occurring unit of spoken English.
Index, conclusions, depends on the genre, right?
How you end a eulogy probably different than how you end a business presentation.
If your business presentation sound like eulogies, probably doesn't bode well for
the business.
So, it really does depend on the genre.
Now, if we're talking about business presentations, informative presentations.
I would say, when we get into that conclusion I'm thinking about two things.
I want to summarize what's just happened and
I want to signal that the conclusion of the speeches about to happen.
So in terms of summary, I know probably a lot of people have received advise in
writing that says don't repeat yourself, do repeat yourself in speaking.
I can't rehear what you said five minutes ago but you can remind me of it.
So I think you should get to the conclusion of that speech,
you certainly want to summarize, review, recap what the key things are,
what the take away are, what you want me and audience member to remember.
But not only summarize you should also be signalling,
you don't want to end the speech and have no one know that you are done.
It's humiliating.
So you will really want to signal to the audience that you are about
to stop talking.
In English, we can do this, if you think about that last line, we can do this
through slowing down that last line and maybe dropping pitch at the end.
This sounds more like a final line.
Right, so that signals to the audience, again that's prosodic marker,
it signals to the audience that you're done.
You can certainly say thank you at the end of your speech.
That's nice, you're kind to your audience.
I don't think you should have to say thank you for us to know that you're done, you
should provide enough practice so that you know how that last line is going to land.
So if something happens and it's unexpected in your speech,
I think really the best thing you can do is acknowledge it and adapt.
Now that depends on the situation obviously, and
your judgement as a speaker.
But I think it's weird if the speaker's standing there and
they're locked in and they're continuing on with their speech,
and there's something going on right next to them.
There's a bird. There's a jackhammer.
Something like that.
And they're ignoring it.
I don't think that makes you look like a good speaker.
You need to acknowledge what's going on around you.
But of course that's difficult because it requires
skills in public speaking it requires that you have topic mastery.
But being able to respond to it and
stay on message is a hallmark of an excellent speaker.
They have such a control of the space, of the room and
of the topic that they can veer off topic without losing their focus.
Now that's tough, that requires being good at public speaking but,
if public speaking was easy, everybody would be good at it.
And they are not.
[MUSIC]
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