Teaching Informative Speaking
Topics & Techniques for Middle, High School, & College Students
Informative speaking is a form of teaching, so draw upon this metaphor to explain the assignment to your students. Here are some informative speaking lesson tips.
In a public speaking class, one of the first major projects your students will complete is the informative speech assignment. This is a fairly straightforward assignment in which the student becomes the teacher and informs the audience about a topic of their choice. Here are some tips for teaching students to become excellent informative speakers.
The Teacher Metaphor
When explaining to students how to give an informative speech, there's a metaphor you can use that students will be very familiar with: you. The informative speech is all about learning to be a teacher, and since your students are familiar with lots of good and bad teachers, you can draw upon this relevant metaphor to explain what's expected of them.
For example, a good informative speech is extemporaneous-- that is, the student uses notes as a guide to speaking, but does not read the speech word for word. Ask them to imagine how ineffective a teacher's lecture would be if it were read word for word. You can demonstrate this by actually reading the lecture you are giving word for word, and then show them a copy of what your extemporaneous lecture notes look like.
In addition, a good informative speaker makes a topic easy for the audience to understand-- just like a good teacher. You can demonstrate this by explaining a topic badly to the students, and then by explaining the topic much more clearly.
Furthermore, a good speaker finds ways to make a topic relevant to the audience-- just like a good speaker. To demonstrate this, talk about the importance of public speaking, and give examples of how public speaking is used by senior citizens, CEOs, and other people the audience probably can't relate to easily. Then talk about the importance of public speaking for young people and for people starting their careers.
Learning to Make a Speech Easy to Understand
Since the main purpose of an informative speech is to teach, a good informative speech is one that's easy for the audience to understand. Thus, it's very important that your students learn how to organize their informative speech well. This is a skill students often find difficult, and it's one instructors need to spend time teaching. Some organizational concepts your students need to understand include:
- Speech outlining. Much as students dislike this, it's a very important part of the assignment-- and will help with writing skills as well.
- Thesis statements that effectively preview the speech.
- Transitions between points, including the use of "signpost" words such as "first" and "finally."
- Conclusions that summarize main points.
In addition, it's important that students learn to use language that's easy for their audience to understand. They need to learn to avoid jargon, or terms that are familiar only to people with a specific interest or profession.
It's also important to help your students choose topics that will not be too difficult to teach and that are appropriate for the assignment. Here's how to choose a great informative speech topic.
Much of informative speaking is governed by common sense. The speaker needs to creatively find ways to allow the audience to learn something. Spend some time brainstorming with your students about effective strategies that each of them can use to teach their topic to the class. Ask the students to think of useful examples that will make the topic easier to understand.
Informative Speech Delivery
Along with speaking extemporaneously, the informative speaker needs to speak in a way that makes the audience members feel they are being spoken with and not spoken at. Here, again, you can draw upon the teacher metaphor, as students understand that a good teacher communicates verbally and nonverbally with students during a lesson. Encourage students to use strong eye contact and effective hand gestures, and to genuinely feel like he or she is talking to the audience.
To practice this, a good exercise is to have each student stand in front of the room and explain how to do something simple that he enjoys that other students may not know how to do. The student shouldn't use notes, and other students should be invited to ask questions. The purpose of this is simply to get students used to the concept of effective teaching.
Of course, an important part of speaking is also learning how to use visual aids. Here are some tips on how to incorporate visual aids effectively into a speech.
The informative speech assignment is a good place to start with your public speaking class. Draw upon the familiar metaphor of teacher, and your students will understand the purpose of presenting information clearly to a group of people.
