Assessment Item 1: Friday 14th March

On Friday this week [Friday the 14th of March] you will be doing the first of your three assessment activities. This will involve giving a one minute prepared introduction to yourself in my office on the third floor. Students will be seen in groups of two from: 9 am to 11 am – Class 1 & 11 am to 1 pm – Class 2. Recordings of the introductions will be placed here on the blogspot.

The ‘Self Introduction’ will be assessed using the assessment criteria used in debating adjudicating namely:
1. manner
2. matter
3. method

The matter is what you say, it is the substance of what you will say in your self-introduction. Among the things I will be interested in are: a. scope / coverage: what type of topics did you cover; b. relevance: how relevant were utterance to the task at hand; and, c. originality: how much did you diverge from typical introductions taught in language textbooks. With respect to the last for example, if you start off by saying : “There are four people in my family….” you can expect not to do particularly well!

Where matter is what you say method is how you organize what you say. You must structure your self introduction well. The first step is to have a clear idea of what you want to say about yourself and which examples you will be using to demonstrate what you are saying. The key thing to remember is that although you know exactly what you are saying the potential audience of what you will be saying [me and the people who access the blog] will have never heard it before and will most probably only hear it once so you have to be very clear.

Manner is how you present what you say and there are various aspects of manner that you need to be aware of. There is no one prescribed way of presenting your self introduction, and perhaps the best advice you can get is to develop a manner style that is natural to you. While you can choose to read your self introduction. remember it will affect the 'naturalness' of what you will be saying. There are many things you can do with your voice to make it effective. You must project so that your voice will be recorded but a minute of speaking loudly can be irritating. Try and use volume, pitch and speed to highlight important information in your self introduction.