Public Speeches with Competent Speakers: Speech Pauses, Head Movements, and Lexical Choices

This study quantitatively explored the characteristics of a good public speech performance as the first step towards establishing objective indexes for teaching and learning public speaking performance. Video recordings of commencement speeches delivered by 10 native English speakers during graduation ceremonies at different universities were obtained from the universitys’ official websites. First, we extracted silent pauses with an automatized software device. Silent intervals longer than or equal to 0.1 s were included, and filled pauses were excluded. These pauses were divided into three categories: period, comma, and others. The distribution of speech pauses based on their types and duration were analyzed. For non-verbal aspects, head movement patterns of each speaker were obtained. We also analyzed lexical choices of each speaker quantitatively with respect to frequency levels based on “Vocabprofile”: frequent 1000-word families, the second 1000-word families, the academic word list, and words that do not appear on other lists. The following findings emerged: 1) The competent speakers clearly divided the pause duration among the pause categories; 2) they looked at the audience frequently (10-20 times per minute); and 3) they tended to avoid difficult words and chose frequent words, and employed repetition.