REFLECTIVE ESSAY ON

PRESENTING
NGUYỄN TRƯƠNG UYÊN VI – 16084
Course: BA2019
Instructor: James Drinkwater
Institute: Vietnamese-German University
In phase three of foundation year, I have studied multiple and important aspects of communicating in
business such as negotiation, telephoning, socializing and presentations in Business English subject.
After a long time considering, I am acknowledged that presentation plays an essential role in my study
program and my future career. Therefore, this essay is written about presenting which is one of the
weaknesses I need to improve. In addition, this paper is considered as a personal record that helps me to
reflect and evaluate what I learnt and what I could apply for my presentation from this lecture.
First of all, the preparation of my presentation started with choosing a suitable topic and creating an
outline. “Social Entrepreneurship in Vietnam”  is selected to present after pondering and searching for
suitable topics. My presentation contains 4 main parts: Definition of Social Entrepreneurship,
background of Social Enterprise in the world and  Vietnam, the opportunities and barriers of Social
Entrepreneurship in Vietnam and the summary. The content of “Social Entrepreneurship in Vietnam”
commenced to be put in PowerPoint to present after planning the outline. Thanks to the lesson in unit 6,
I know how to organize the structure of my PowerPoint slides and my speech more clearly and
effectively. In addition, I learnt from unit 7 that visual aids play a vital role in attracting attention of
audiences and supporting the speech. According to the lesson, images and charts provide a clearer and
easier way for listeners to observe and relate to the information of the speech. Moreover, a study of
Grady and colleagues (1998), demonstrated that humans can remember pictures better than words, so
putting more images can help listeners remember the information that I want to impart. For the
evaluation, I feel my preparation is much more advanced and my presentation is shorter, compared to
the presentation I did in the previous phase. To be more specific, my presentation’s structure is clearer
and the visual aids are controlled better.

Secondly, although I prepared carefully and practiced carefully the night before, the speech is not
successful as expected. In other words, I realized that the way I presented the information of the topic
was unattractive and unsatisfied because of unpredictable mistakes. In fact, I forget mentioning the
reason I chose this topic to help listeners have an overall look at my speech.Moreover, my presentation
was unfinished due to the information I want to impart is too much in a 5-minute presentation and my
speed talking is quite slow. Because of my nervousness, I made some mistake in my presentation. The
first flaw was my unstable speed talking, I spoke slowly at first then spoke really fast near the end of
the speech due to the fact that I was running out of time. I think this made  audiences feel hard to
understand clearly each key point in the content. The second flaw was lacking linking phrases which

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can strengthen the structure of my presentation and help me to present smoothly. The third flaw was
time management, I could not have enough time to mention the “Opportunities and Barriers” part
adequately and clearly and immediately skip to the summary section. To be honest, I regret not
completing my speech. I should find a better way to present briefly all the content if I have a chance to
do it in this phase. However, I was quite satisfied when I remembered to use linking phrases and
mention mostly necessary information in the introduction. As a result, these mistakes lead to boredom
and discomfort for audiences. Regretfully, we did not have enough time to do the “Question and
Answer” section. According to the presentation lessons, this part is crucial for both presenters and
listeners that enhance interaction between them and give speakers a chance to estimate how much
information the audiences can absorb. Regarding some solutions to tackle all mistakes mentioned, I
think confidence is the most important thing that I need to have. In addition, I must practice harder and
calculate time carefully to make my performance perfect next time. The knowledge of presenting
lessons is useful for me which I will apply to my next presentation and is  one of essential skills of
business students I need to improve. 

In summary, lessons about presenting in Business English subjects are helpful for me to improve my
presentation skills in phase three and all of my speech in my study career. In addition, the final
presentation and reflective essay at the end of this phase is a useful method to estimate knowledge that I
learnt in this phase and the way I put it into practice. This reflective essay is not only an effective way
to reflect my knowledge but also a feedback on my public speaking skill that can help me to fix all the
mistakes I made.

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 REFERENCES
Grady, C. L., McIntosh, A. R., Rajah, M. N., & Craik, F. I. M. (1998, March 3). Neural correlates of the episodic
encoding of pictures and words. Retrieved from: https://www.pnas.org/content/95/5/2703/tab-article-info