Speech Therapy

Last night at my language class we had to give an oral presentation. I hate these things. Mainly because my Swedish speaking skill level is by far my weakest point. As I guess it's always the last thing to master for most immigrants. I get so frustrated at not being about to get the message out in the way it exists inside my head. It's like having one arm permanently encased in plaster. Yeah, you can still do stuff, but you know that you used to be able to do it much better. Anyway, that's how it feels to me.

The theme was language and communication. Which was no great surprise given that it is a language class. We were free to take any approach we wanted, with the only requirement being that we had to include a couple of published works from a series of articles (about 30) in a book that we had been given. A few weeks ago one of my classmates gave a really good presentation on how the ability to communicate determines much of your personality and that, once that ability is compromised, your personality can alter. I hadn't thought about that before, but it rang true to me.

There were two of us who presented our topics last night. One guy spoke about the perceived importance of a name and how that importance can vary, depending on cultural or historical traditions. I found it to be really interesting and, like any good presentation, it opened the topic up for discussion at the end of the presentation.

For me, I took a less personal approach and chose a couple of articles that discussed the value and appropriate use of cliques. I enjoyed researching the subject and coming up with my own theories on the future direction of language evolution. It was fun.

The presentation itself wasn't so much fun. We have an "approximate" time limit, and I've always struggled with that in the past. So I spent a lot of time trimming as much fat out of my speech as I could, without losing too much structure. Which wasn't easy. On the other side, I know that I tend to talk fast when I'm nervous, and the clarity of my language starts to suffer. There's a fine line between Swenglish and just plain gibberish. As that's the entire point of the exercise, I was a bit worried about it, and kept forcing myself to slow down my speech the whole time. Which meant that I got pinged a couple of points for running over time. But I got through it.

With any luck that's the last time I'll have to give an oral presentation in class. There's a lot of things hanging up in the air at the moment as to whether or not the class is going to continue. I hope they find a solution because, as much as I hate it, I need the structured class too keep me focused solely on my new language. As a first time language student it's been a real battle. More than I could ever have imagined. And will be for a few years more. I know I've said it before but I'll always be grateful to the Swedish education system. This is not something I could ever have just "picked up" on my own. Without SFI classes to give me that base language grounding, I'm almost certain that I would be back in NZ today. I must send them a Thank You card some time.