Presenting at a national conference for the first time

Your proposal was accepted. Somewhere between the relief and the date, panic arrives: forty minutes, in front of colleagues, about your own work.

Here is what to do with those forty minutes, and what nobody warns you about.

Plan for less content than you think

The single most common first-timer mistake is preparing too much. Twenty-eight slides, four studies, three frameworks — and at minute thirty-five you are rushing through the part that actually mattered.

A working rule: one main idea, three supporting points, one thing the audience takes away. That is it. If you have more, you have a second session, not a fuller first one.

Build the talk backwards from the takeaway. What do you want a teacher to try on Monday? Everything else exists to earn that sentence.

Structure that survives contact with a real room

Minutes 0–3 — the hook. Not your CV. Start with the moment that made you do this: a student's comment, a set of exam results, a lesson that collapsed. People remember the story and then listen to the argument.

Minutes 3–8 — context and question. Where, with whom, what you wanted to know. Concrete.

Minutes 8–20 — what you did. The intervention or the method. Show the real artefacts: the worksheet, the student's text, the photo of the board.

Minutes 20–30 — what happened. Including what did not work. Sessions that admit failure are trusted, remembered and asked about.

Minutes 30–35 — what it means for them. Translate your findings into what a teacher in the room could do.

Minutes 35–40 — questions.

If your session is a workshop, invert this. Most of the time should be participants doing something. A workshop where the audience listens for thirty-five minutes is a lecture with a misleading label — and the audience chose it expecting to work.

Slides

• One idea per slide.
• Text large enough to read from the back. If you are unsure, it is too small.
• No paragraphs. If you need to read it out, it belongs in your notes.
• Show real student work — anonymised, with permission. It is the most persuasive material you have.
• Have a version that works without your laptop, your adapter and the internet. All three will fail eventually.

Rehearse out loud, once, with a timer

Not in your head. Out loud, standing, timed. It is uncomfortable and it is the highest-return twenty minutes of preparation available. You will find the section that runs long and the sentence you cannot say.

If your session is in English and English is not your first language, rehearsing out loud also does something specific: it converts anxiety about proficiency into familiarity with your own script.

What nobody tells you

Almost nobody will notice your mistakes. The audience does not have your outline. If you skip a slide, they do not know it existed.

Small audiences are normal. Concurrent sessions split the room. Eight engaged people is a good session, and the conversation afterwards is often better than in a full auditorium.

Silence after "any questions?" is not failure. People need a few seconds. Wait — count to seven in your head. If nothing comes, ask them something instead: "Has anyone tried something similar? What happened?" That almost always opens the room.

The hard question is a gift. Someone taking your work seriously enough to press on it is the best outcome of the day. "That is a good point and I do not have data on it" is a completely acceptable answer. Nobody expects a first-time presenter to have anticipated everything.

Time works differently at the front. Put your phone or a watch where you can see it. Mark on your notes where you should be at minute twenty.

Two things worth doing that are not the talk

Attend other people's sessions. Especially in your area. You will find who else is working on your question, and that is how co-authors happen.

Talk to one person you did not know. Not networking in the corporate sense. Ask someone what they teach and where. Colombian ELT is a small enough community that one conversation can turn into a shared project two years later.

If you are a student presenter

At ASOCOPI's conference, undergraduate students presenting must have a supervising teacher who either presents with them or certifies that they will accompany the whole process. Use that. Rehearse in front of your supervisor and ask them to interrupt.

And afterwards

Write down, that same day, three things: what worked, what you would cut, and any question the audience asked that you could not answer. That last one is very often the seed of your next study — or of the article that comes out of this talk.

Then send the article. The talk is already most of the work.

Keep going

• See the session types and lengths for the ASOCOPI conference.
• The webinar library has a recorded session on writing abstracts for academic events.
• Turn the talk into a paper: publishing in HOW Journal.