Improve Your Public Speaking Skills 1. Practice in a 【T1】______ environment 【T1】______ ■ Receive feedback about

Improve Your Public Speaking Skills
Students in American schools learn from an early age to give presentations as part of their regular classroom activities. Children as young as five years old often give brief talks about objects they bring in to school--called "show and tell"; this training is a basis for later public speaking. Even so, many native English-speaking adults are afraid to speak or give presentations in front of a large group. There is a large industry of consultants who train professionals in public speaking. Today, we’ll cover this topic and help you conquer the fear of public speaking.
First of all, the best way to improve is to practice public speaking in a friendly environment. Learners need to receive feedback about what they are doing well and about their mistakes. One group that gives members the chance to practice is Toastmasters. Toastmasters is an international organization that holds weekly meetings. At the meetings, members each give a speech and give others advice about their speeches and speaking style.
Second, simplify and break it down. The central thing to remember about public speaking or presentation is that it’s a very complex, sophisticated communicative activity. For non-native speakers it’s a really scary activity. So to make that more simplistic and easy for them, and to keep it from being so overwhelming, because there’re so many things going on, the approach that I’ve taken is to divide public speaking into three parts: the physical message, the visual message, and the story message, and focus on one thing each time.
If we observe a presentation, there’s what I call the physical message. It’s basically body language. It’s the way that my body, as a speaker, is talking to the audience: how I move my lips, my head, my hands, how I stand, how I make eye contacts with my audience... My body communicates how I feel and how I want my audience to feel to them.
Then there’s also the visual message. The visual message(s) are the slides that we now make and show the audience: what we call as a PowerPoint. Make full use your slides, especially when you have photos, graphics, data, and so on, which speak to the audience in a more direct, vivid manner.
The third message is the story message. The story message is the content of our presentation. So another way we can think of the story message is that it’s the verbal message, it’s what we say to the audience. The story message also includes how we organize our ideas to present to the audience.
Another trick is videotaping. Many of you now have a phone or device that can take videos. Ask a friend to videotape your speech or presentation. Using these videos, you can watch yourself and see how you appeared to your audience. You can also watch models of good speeches on the Internet and learn from watching videos of public speaking experts.
Speaking in front of a crowd is considered the number one fear of the average person. And the second is death. Anyway, overwhelming as public speaking is, it still could be managed and improved through practice.