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 english I understand and then to my mother tongue. When giving a talk, I have to translate my thoughts to english on-the-fly. I do my best to pronounce all the word 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 a sense in Czech) yet I do mistakes. I need to be corrected when I commit such to be able to avoid them in the future.
Throughout the time I've developped shortcuts and I am "thinking in simple english" to reduce the delay between question and answer. But it took a long time and I needed to be interacting in english only with no workarounds.
I have also attended sevaral international congerences with speakers ranging from grads to tenured professors from all over the world.
Trust me, Scottish english, French english, Correan english, Russian english,... 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 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 german, french, spanish, etc. and ask native speakers for assessment.