Oral Presentations & Projects in the World Language Classroom
Oral presentations have been a part of World Language curricula for many years. Many of us who took a language in middle and high school remember getting up in front of our peers and awkwardly presenting on a theme in the target language… it was challenging, but it made us more resilient students and language learners and helped us see how the language we were studying could be applied in performance-based contexts, rather than through vocabulary worksheets and verb conjugations.
In this blog post, I’ll discuss why we should still have our students engage in oral presentations, offer some suggestions for best practices, and provide resources to help you implement oral presentations in your own World Language classroom!
What are the benefits of Oral Presentations?
Language Proficiency Development
Speaking Fluency: Regular oral presentations help students become more comfortable forming sentences and expressing ideas in the target language.
Pronunciation and Intonation: Presenting in a spoken context forces attention to how words sound, helping students improve pronunciation and comprehensibility in the target language.
Vocabulary and Grammar Usage: Students have to apply new and familiar vocabulary and grammatical language structures in meaningful contexts, which builds retention and automaticity.
Cognitive and Communication Skills
Organization of Ideas: Preparing a presentation requires students to organize information logically and coherently.
Critical Thinking: When presenting or responding to questions, students need to think on their feet—especially in the target language.
Clarity of Expression: Students improve their ability to communicate information clearly and confidently, which is a transferable skill.
Memory Reinforcement: Saying things out loud helps encode them more deeply into memory, especially when speaking in the target language.
Listening and Peer Learning
Active Listening: When students listen to their peers, they practice listening comprehension skills in an authentic way.
Modeling: Hearing how other students have approached the same linguistic task can reinforce vocabulary and grammar structures.
Assessment Variety
Alternative to tests: Oral presentations provide a more holistic view of what a student can do with the language—not just what they can write or memorize.
Performance-based assessment: It aligns with ACTFL proficiency standards and real-world language use.
Best Practices for Oral Presentations
When I assign oral presentations, I make sure that students are required to use the vocabulary and grammar they have been studying recently in order to complete a task. For example, if students have learned family vocabulary, they will present a family tree. When implementing oral presentations in your World Language Class, consider the following best practices:
Start Small and Scaffold - A big mistake I see novice language teachers make is that they don’t provide enough small, informal speaking tasks during instruction. This could be a quick 5-minute think-pair-share in the target language at the start of class, or it could be a more structured speaking activity like the ones I discuss in my Effective Interpersonal Speaking Activities to Get Your French, Spanish, Italian Students Speaking in Class blog post. Incorporating ample speaking activities throughout your instructional phase helps build confidence in student performance, which in turn gives them the courage and self-efficacy to perform an oral presentation in front of peers.
Model Expectations - Explain to students what your expectations are for the oral presentation. Do a sample presentation yourself (preferably in English) where you show strong and weak examples of language use.
Stress the Value of Rehearsal - I tell students that when they go see a play or live performance, they’re not seeing the countless hours of rehearsal time that went into preparing the performers to take the stage. Equally, students need to spend ample time rehearsing prior to the date of the in-class presentation.
Consider Video Options - You may have highly-anxious students who are unable to present in front of their peers, or you may want to provide students with multiple choices for how to complete the assignment. Having students pre-record their presentations and showing them in class can be a great idea.
Use Rubrics that Reflect Proficiency Goals - Make sure your rubrics are detailed and fair in the way that they assess important criteria like fluency, language use, communication skills, etc.
Resources for Oral Presentations
I offer 12+ World Language Projects, Skits, Role Plays, and Presentations in my French, Spanish, and Italian 1 Project Bundles.
Provide your students with the opportunity to connect the vocabulary, grammar, and culture that they have been studying to their own personal lives. These are great summative and performance assessments, and they will allow you to bring the language to life and ensure that students are able to demonstrate what they have learned in meaningful and engaging ways.
Feel free to invest in the whole bundle and set yourself up for a year of success, or
pick and choose the projects that best align with your curricular needs!
Each of these resources comes in a PRINTABLE PDF, so your prep is minimal - simply print, photocopy, and you're all set! Each resource also comes with an EDITABLE Google Doc so that you can customize the project requirements, organizers, and rubrics to best suit your curriculum and your students' needs.
Each resource comes with...
Objectives, Directions, and Suggestions for Implementation to help you implement the projects in your classroom based on my personal experience using them in my own French classes for many years.
Project Handout that lays out the scenario, project requirements, and helpful information to guide students along.
Project Checklist/Organizer to keep students focused and on-task.
Assessment Rubrics to help you easily, fairly, and accurately assess student work and performance.
Listening/Extension Activities to help engage your student audience during performances and presentations, and extend your students' use of language.
⭐⭐ This resource is a GROWING BUNDLE, which means you will be entitled to any future projects that I add to it! You will also be entitled to any future updates, improvements, and expansions to the existing projects in the bundle. ⭐⭐
I hope this post has helped you think about the importance of assessing oral speaking proficiency, and that you are walking away with a few more tools in your toolbox for ways in which you can assess your students fairly, accurately, and in a time-efficient manner.
Do you implement oral presentations in your World Language classroom? If so, what works best for you? Feel free to share your experience in the comment section below! I’d love to hear all about it.
Happy language teaching,
~ Michael
