Teaching presentation skills is by no means an easy task. To teach such skills effectively, a teacher must help the students to learn how to (1) design and organize the presentation contenteffectively; (2) strengthen their verbal and nonverbal communication skills;and (3) master the use of visual aids. Often, the traditional face-to-face classroom setting falls short when the lecturer has to teach more than 100 students how to observe small details of body language and vocal skills. In this case, a blended learning mode — a hybrid of face-to-face and online learning — may be a better option than a pure face-to-face learning mode (Fang, Chow & Soo, 2012).
The purpose of this paperis to demonstrate how blended learning can be implemented to teach university students' presentation skills. In the spring term of 2013, ENGL A122F: Presentation Skills, a five-credit course for full-time undergraduate students, was first delivered via a blended learning approach at the Open University of Hong Kong. Attempting to combine the best features of the online and face-to-face modes of teaching, the blended delivery course incorporated video and interactive web-based components into the course outline.
In this paper, I share my experience of how presentation skills can be taught through video lectures and assessed through the online learning environment (OLE), alongside traditional teacher-led lectures and tutorials. Also, I discuss how the blended learning approach, compared with the traditional face-to-face teaching mode, can not only facilitate propositional knowing, but also help learners to achieveexperiential knowing, and presentational knowing (Heron & Reason, 2006). Last but not least, the paper reflects on students'feedback, as well as the challengeswhen implementing the blended learning mode.
Cross-dressing, as a cultural practice, suggests gender ambiguity and allows freedom of self expression. Yet, it may also serve to reaffirm ideological stereotypes and the binary distinctions between male and female, masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual. To explore the nature and function of cross-dressing in Chinese and Western cultures, this paper analyzes the portrayals of cross-dressing heroines in two Chinese stories:《木蘭辭》 The Ballad of Mulan (500–600 A.D.), and 《梁山伯與祝英台》The Butterfly Lovers (850–880 A.D.). Distorted representations in the English translated texts are also explored.
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