P is for Pecha Kucha

What is PechaKucha 20×20?

PechaKucha 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images.

(from the official Pecha Kucha website)

Cooking, Strategies style (1975)

Pecha kuchas have become regular events at ELT conferences, ever since Lindsay Clandfield introduced the genre at the IATEFL Conference in Exeter in 2008, and where I had the dubious honour of being one of the presenters. My 20 times 20 seconds of fame was called Eating for Specific Purposes, and dealt with the way that food, and specifically recipes, have been portrayed in ELT coursebooks over the years. That gives you an indication of the kind of (often fairly frivolous) topics that are the subject of pecha kuchas, which are typically staged as an evening entertainment, not unlike a Victorian parlour game.

But when I was asked to do a pecha kucha at the KOTESOL conference in Seoul last October, I chose a topic that was a little more ambitious: a sort of potted history of second language acquisition (SLA) theory in alphabetical order (a nod both to the book, An A-Z of ELT, and the eponymous blog). I also wanted to reduce the amount of text on the slides to a minimum: in my experience 20 seconds a slide doesn’t allow for a whole lot of cognitive processing, especially when the presenter is talking nineteen to the dozen, as one tends to do.

Well, this is the result, kindly made available by KOTESOL. What do you think?