The course is, as I hope, intended to improve students' presentation skills so they can deliver their results more effectively on the international stage, not only on the local backyard called university. English is not my mother tongue, therefore I need to translate the speaker's speech from their accent to englishEnglish I understand and then to my mother tongue. When giving a talk, I have to translate my thoughts to englishEnglish on-the-fly. I do my best to pronounce all the wordwords correctly even with nuances (sheet vs. sh*t, bed vs. bad); I do my best to use correct grammar structures; I do my best to avoid my-languages-homonyms misunderstanding (word-to-word translation of "Your eyes September" gives amakes sense in Czech) yet I make mistakes. I need to be corrected when I commit such to be able to avoid them in the future.
Throughout the time I've developpeddeveloped shortcuts and I am "thinking in simple english"English" to reduce the delay between question and answer. But it took a long time and I needed to be interacting in englishEnglish only with no workarounds.
I have also attended sevaralseveral international congerencescongresses with speakers ranging from grads to tenured professors from all over the world.
Trust me, Scottish englishEnglish, French englishEnglish, Correan englishKorean English, Russian englishEnglish,... all with their accents, grammar leaks combined with speaker stress made a lot of talks unable for me to process.
Therefore:
- Do comment on the students' grammar, vocabulary, pronounciation and pronunciation errors. That's how they can learn and improve.
- Do not include this in the final assessment. Give the points only according to the actual quality of their work.
- Try to give a presentation of your work in either germanGerman, frenchFrench, spanishSpanish, etc. and ask native speakers for assessment.