Having researched and developed content in preparation for an interactive lecture, you have likely accumulated a great deal of information related to the topic. If you decide to inform students about the plan for the session, you will have even more to communicate. Students can find listening to all of this information challenging. They can get lost in what you are saying and not be able to see how it is connected to what they are, or should be, doing. Indeed, human capacity for listening attentively is one of the key drawbacks of the lecture.

Lecturers, however, can use language to good effect to help students keep track of the central focus and the format of a lecture. Certain language structures can aid student understanding and thus can help improve learning. These structures can show that the ideas follow a logical order and build on each other, creating presentation flow. If the presentation proceeds well from point to point, listeners will be able to follow the progression of ideas and have an easier time grasping the information and the connections between it and class activities. In this chapter, we provide Tips for using language to signal the structure of the content and of the session as shown in Exhibit 6.1.