Language learners and Power Point presentations

Power Point is one of those technologies people tend to use just because it's there. It should be employed judiciously, however, because when misused, it detracts from a presentation rather than adding to it. Unskilled use of this technology can scatter audience attention rather than focusing it.

The biggest danger is that using Power Point tends to reduce rather than enhancing the speaker's ability to communicate with the audience. An important presentation skill is using eye contact to maintain rapport. Effective use of eye contact keeps an audience focused on a talk.

Needless to say, when presenters become so enraptured with their own Power Point presentations that they can't stop looking at them, eye contact suffers, and consequently audience rapport is lost.

Another problem arises when Power Point screens are filled with small font type. This distraction is compounded when the speaker reads this fine print to the audience -- even though it's projected on the screen.

A speaker is not a reader, and listening to a "speaker" read aloud from screens is uninteresting. Instead of using eye contact to maintain rapport with the listeners, unskilled presenters turn their backs, consequently losing their connection with the audience.

Nevertheless, there are some presentations that can truly be made better by using Power Point. If the presenter wants to point out features of a building, a painting, or a sculpture, or to explain a complex but clear and visible diagram, a picture really can be worth a thousand words.