Reflection on the Pecha Kucha experience

Presenting plurilingualism in 20 pictures and 20 seconds was a lot harder than I expected it to be.  When I finally finished with the last sentence of our presentation, I was relieved (might be I even gave a sigh of relief). “It’s finally over”. Looking back on the making of our presentation and on the final product now, I feel like I should analyze the “evolution” of our Pecha Kucha project on plurilingualism.

Me and Tiana, my partner in this project, started out with a survey that we put together ourselves. Before we even looked at the graphs and information on plurilingualism in Europe, we decided that we wanted to know what people around us actually knew and thought about plurilingualism. After selecting several questions, such as the question of whether they supported plurilingualism or a Lingua Franca, we sent our questionnaire to all European citizens from abroad that we knew. Of course we attached a small message explaining the meaning of plurilingualism and giving some background information on our project.

As soon as we had gathered all the data, we started creating graphs with the help of a website called Onlinecharttool. Shortly after, we started to gather more additional information on graphs published by the EU, known as the EU Barometer, informed ourselves about the difference between plurilingualism and multilingualism and tried to gain some insight on action taken by the EU to improve plurilingual competence.

Our next step was to hand in the first draft of our Pecha Kucha transcript, to obtain feedback from our teacher. We finished with adjusting our presentation to our teacher’s recommendations and added two slides concerning pluricultural competence. Afterwards we practiced and practiced and practiced….until we were eventually able to give our presentation in the appropriate time frame.

Even so, it was difficult to present each slide in exactly 20 seconds. Even more so, as I was extremely nervous and generally am before speeches. If I could turn back time, I would probably try to ignore the watch lying in front of me, taking the time.