The Oral Presentation That Ran Long
A student is preparing the school-assessed oral presentation. The task requires a 4–5 minute talk in Japanese on a chosen topic, followed by 3 minutes of Q&A. The student's draft script is 720 characters long. When rehearsed, it takes 6 minutes 20 seconds to deliver because the student pauses frequently to search for vocabulary. The student plans to cut the script to 500 characters to fit the time limit. The teacher has noted that the assessment criteria reward depth of content and interactional skills in the Q&A, and that reading from a script is penalised. The student is anxious because shortening the script will remove two of the three main points they wanted to make.
1. Identify the main problem with the student's plan to cut the script to 500 characters, and explain what the character count does and does not tell us about delivery time.
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The plan targets the wrong variable. 720 characters delivered in 6:20 implies roughly 114 characters per minute - far slower than normal fluent speech, which for beginner-level Japanese is typically around 200–250 characters per minute. The 6:20 is therefore mostly pause time, not content length. Cutting to 500 characters would still take about 4:20 at the same pace, so the student would solve nothing while losing content. The real issue is fluency and vocabulary retrieval, which also directly affects the interactional criteria in Q&A. A better plan is to keep all three points, reduce sentence complexity, and rehearse aloud repeatedly so that delivery speed rises toward 200+ characters per minute. At that pace, 500–600 characters fits comfortably in 4–5 minutes. The student should also practise paraphrasing unknown words rather than pausing, since this is a skill the Q&A rewards.
2. The student proposes to memorise the script word-for-word to avoid pauses. Evaluate this against the assessment criteria described.
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Memorisation addresses pauses but conflicts with the criterion penalising script reading. A fully memorised monologue tends to sound recited and breaks down under the smallest distraction, producing a worse fluency impression than a lightly-prepared talk. It also does not develop the interactive skills tested in the Q&A, where the student must respond to unscripted questions. A stronger approach is to memorise only the opening and closing sentences and a keyword cue card for each of the three main points, so the student speaks from meaning rather than from text. This preserves content depth, avoids the script-reading penalty, and builds the flexible retrieval needed in Q&A. The student should rehearse with a partner asking unpredictable follow-up questions to simulate the 3-minute interaction.