Professional Development: GaTESOL/ Using the 3-Minute Thesis in Various Oral Communication Classes

Heather Boldt

Margareta Larsson

Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) is speaking competition for graduate students from different Universities across the world. Competition candidates must present their research project or graduate thesis in under three minutes while using only a single PowerPoint slide. The presentations are authentic and conveniently compiled, and many times contain well communicated accented non-native speech.

At GaTESOL, Heather Bodlt and Margareta Larsson presented a session that examined the 3MT competition’s usefulness in ESL oral communication classrooms. They, after using 3MT in their own classrooms, noticed that within the presentations there were common organizational patterns, useful techniques to keep the audience’s attention, strategies for defining and illustrating new terms and ideas, native-like patterns and rhythms of speech, and engaging uses of body language. Having ESL students watch, observe and mimic these presentations through mirroring was a great activity for ELLs to pick up native-like speaking behaviors. By supplementing this project with other activities focusing on use of focus words, pausing, linking, and thought groups – the presenters found great success in their ESL classrooms. They noticed that their students were effectively communicating with native like body language and felt more confident with public speaking.

Boldt and Larsson also talked about the steps to automaticity in second language learners’ oral communication skills. They mention that awareness leads to partial control which can lead to unconscious comprehension and then later full control of speech. Their activities with the 3MT involved giving low and intermediate level ESL students different transcripts of 3MT presentations and then having these students watch without sound, mimic body language, watch with sound, observe pauses, thought groups, and stressed words, and finally mirror the presenter they observe. Students later recorded themselves giving the presentation and sent the teacher a copy of their performance.

Different icebreakers can be used to prepare students for public speaking, including practicing tongue twisters and sirens as warm ups. After recording themselves, one of the presenter had students create a poster presentation where students presented passages from their presentation to different groups of students – teaching them pronunciation through word stress identification, body language use, and use or pauses accordingly. After these activities, students reported feeling more confident and found that they nurtured skills that were helpful when speaking with friends and native speakers.

I thought this session was a very inventive and incredible insightful way to teach oral communication. The one question I had was about the automaticity of natural speech – and if in fact mirroring native speakers or native like speech can actually lead to automaticity. Often times I found that memorization does not always lead to automatic production of target content – since students do not always process or acquire the target content through inductive methods of learning. It was obvious from the videos of the ESL speakers that many of them could impressively mimic native English speech and body language, however I wonder if they would be able to apply these observations and skills when generating and presenting their own novel speeches.