Paper Abstract

An Instructional Design for Teaching Oral Presentations
in the Business Language Classroom

Business presentation, an important language skill in a market economy, has a special significance for our students of business languages. However, nothing seems to have been reported in the literature on the teaching or research of oral business presentations in the foreign language classroom.

This paper is based on a development project completed at Brigham Young University in 1995, where I taught business Chinese for the Foreign Language Track of the MBA Program. Not meant to be a complete project or course report, it only carries brief descriptions of three major parts in the instructional design--objective analysis, instructional product and formative evaluation. The approach of collaborative discovery learning presented in the paper is by no means language-specific or task-specific. Having been used in the actual teaching of business oral presentation at BYU, it may also be applied to other advanced business language courses for different instructional objectives.

--presented at the 15th Annual Conference on Languages and Communication for World Business and the Professions, Ypsilanti, MI, 1996

Return to List
Selected Publications