The next time you’re standing in line at the post office, you’ll have the chance to hear a speech from a colleague or a professor. It only takes a couple minutes, and the content of the speech will be interesting.
However, I think there are some common misunderstandings here. First, the speech is not the same as a lecture. Lecturers and professors are the only ones who can lecture, and they will usually give a speech. On the other hand, a speech is a formal speech, and teachers, professors, and colleagues all have different ways of delivering one. The way that I see it, speech is a very social activity with a wide range of goals and audiences.
The speech content of a lecture is unique and is not something separate from other parts of the speech, so your audience will have to decide whether or not they are interested in your lecture.
The speech content is really important in a classroom setting. As much as teachers may want to present their own ideas, they also need to be the ones with the most knowledge of what the class is interested in. That means they need to be able to speak that content fluently.
In the speech of a teacher, the audience has to decide whether or not they are interested in what the teacher is talking about. If they are, then they will have to listen carefully to the speech or they will make a poor decision. If they are not, they will have to decide if they understand something that the teacher is saying. If they don’t understand, then they have to make a decision whether or not they are interested in what the teacher is saying.
In the classroom, this kind of decision making is not nearly as important as it is in the real world. Students are usually not aware of the speech choices that the teacher has made, so if they are not interested in what is being said, they are unlikely to pay attention.
Because they are in a classroom setting, students have the ability to hear and understand everything that the teacher is saying. Because they are so immersed in the world of the teacher, however, they are most likely to pay attention to what they hear.
We’ve found that speech and language strategies can be very helpful to classroom teachers, especially when trying to make students pay attention. In our recent study of 100 classroom teachers, we found that those that used visual aids on a regular basis had greater student attention. Those that used a more active voice used their time to talk more and had a higher percentage of students paying attention. We also found that those who used more active speech used their time more efficiently and had a higher percentage of students paying attention.
Speech and language are two different things, but they are closely related. We don’t usually think of them as being separate but equally important aspects of communication. To make them more effective, speech needs to be more active, and language needs to be more active too. Let’s look at some of the ways we can make language and speech more effective.
First, we can make it easier for students to understand what we say. We can do this by having more information available at the time we talk, more often. In other words, we can make it easier for students to process what we have to say and what we mean. We can do this by using more context-rich sentences and more complex sentences. This helps students to understand their point better. This is one of the reasons why we use more of simple sentences with complex meaning.