Multimodal Presentations are now compulsory assessments for Year 11 and Year 12. In this part of our guide, we break them down and step you through how to ace them!
In this guide, we give you a detailed breakdown of what to expect and look at a NESA sample assessment. We also give you a step-by-step process for putting your Band 6 presentations together!
Multimodal Presentations have been around for a while, but now they are a compulsory part of Year 11 and 12 assessments.
But what are multimodal presentations?
Multimodal presentations require you to deliver an oral presentation, often with a visual element.
This can be a daunting and technical task.
1. Lack of preparation
Many students simply don’t prepare adequately.
It’s very easy for students to feel that a three to five-minute presentation will be easy and something they can present off the cuff.
2. Don’t take advantage of a range of modes
Others don’t take advantage of the range of modes they have at their disposal to present in.
You, like your peers, might do poorly in Multimodal Presentations because you are nervous and stumble through your presentation.
At the root of these struggles is a failure to dedicate enough time to preparing their multimodal presentation.
In this article, we’ll talk you through how to prepare for your Multimodal Presentation and give you practical strategies for delivering an insightful speech.
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From 2018, all Year 11 students will have to give one multimodal presentation as part of their three formal assessments.
In Year 12, from 2019 onwards, students will need to give one multimodal presentation as part of the formal assessment process.
But what exactly is a multimodal presentation?
Producing a multimodal presentation is a daunting experience.
The off-putting aspect is knowing that you need to stand and present in front of your peers. This is what the majority of students get anxious about.
The best way to avoid this anxiety is to prepare thoroughly – this includes:
NESA defines the different ways of engaging with texts as modes. They provide the following categories: listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing and representing.
We can break these down further into two varieties:
| Table: The Modes of Communication | |
| Engaging | Producing |
| Listening | Writing |
| Viewing | Representing |
| Reading | Speaking |
When something is multimodal, it uses a combination of two or more of the above modes. NESA defines multimodal as:
“Comprising more than one mode. A multimodal text uses a combination of two or more communication modes, for example, print, image and spoken text as in film or computer presentations.”
“The multimodal presentation is designed to provide students with the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge, understanding and skills across all of the modes. A multimodal presentation includes at least one mode other than reading and writing such as listening, speaking, viewing and representing.
No specific weightings have been allocated to the modes to allow flexibility in task design and to meet the needs and interests of students in a range of contexts.”
But what does this mean? Let’s break it down:
These multimodal tasks are not new, but now they are mandatory.
The most common form for this sort of task is currently a visual representation of an idea or character from a text and an accompanying presentation that explains the student’s choices.
Another common task is a presentation accompanied by slides – such as a PowerPoint or Prezi presentation.
A multimodal presentation requires you to demonstrate aptitude across various modes.
This reflects the requirements of communication in the real world and will be necessary skills for you in the majority of modern workplaces.
Visual representation
Multimodal presentations will require some skills with visual representations.
However, you will not be expected to produce amazing artworks.
Instead, you will be assessed on how you represent ideas and the strategies that you take.
Speaking skills
The other important skill you will be assessed on will be your speaking skills.
As much as the vast majority of people dislike public speaking, it is a necessary skill for communicating.
You will be assessed on how well you present information orally. This will include a focus on –
So, now you know what is involved, how do you prepare for a multimodal presentation? Let’s take a look.
It goes without saying that you have to have a thorough understanding of your text to do well in a multimodal assessment.
This means that you should thoroughly read and analyse your set text or texts.
The other things you will need to work on are your presentation skills and techniques and your visual representations.
As the tasks you will be set will vary from text to text and teacher to teacher, it is hard to give universal advice. What we can do, though, is provide a step-by-step process for approaching these types of tasks.
To demonstrate the potential requirements of a visual task, we have modified the assessment task and criteria by including a visual element in the assessment task.
The sample task is for the Common Module: Text and Human Experience and is on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. This sample assessment has two parts:
Compose an imaginative text of no more than 700 words to reflect your understanding of human experiences related to one of the following three areas that you have focused on in class:
The type of text you choose may be a short story, a script, a performance poem, or another type of text approved by your teacher. Your teacher will provide three lessons in class for you to write, conference and/or edit your work and the final version will be submitted on the due date.
This is the creative part of the task. You must produce an imaginative text of your own based on an existing one. You will submit it, and once you have received a mark, you will have to give a presentation.
This presentation is Part B of the task, described below:
In class, on the due date, you will give a presentation and explain and evaluate how your composition represents your understanding of human experiences and how this understanding has been reflected and/or challenged in one piece of self-selected related material. The presentation to the class should be no more than three minutes in length and must include the use of a visual aid.
This is the reflection part of the assessment.
This reflection requires you to create a visual stimulus to help you explain your knowledge of the text and your reflection on your creative task. Reflection tasks are quite common and take a variety of forms.
If you want to know more about reflection tasks, read this detailed blog post.
To help you prepare for assessments, students must be presented with an assessment marking criteria to show students what is expected of them. Now let’s take a look at a marking criteria.
The NESA sample includes a marking criteria. As we have modified the task, we have amended the criteria to reflect the inclusion of a visual element.
To achieve a Band 6 result a student must:
Now we can see what the standards being set are, we need to unpack them to respond to them. Let’s break down what these mean, exactly.
A marking criteria is a kind of Rosetta Stone, it allows students and teachers to communicate using a common language.
Students must use the marking criteria that accompany the assessment notification to decipher the teacher’s expectations for the task.
Think about that for a moment.
In the criteria, teachers give students the specific details of what they must do get full marks.
Clearly, this is a useful document. To make sense of it, let’s unpack the four metrics that will be used to assess if you have produced a Band 6 result or not.
This statement says that you must have a “finely crafted text.” This is referring to your creative submission. To be finely crafted your creative submission needs to be:
In addition, it needs to demonstrate an “insightful understanding of human experiences.” This may sound complex, but really it is not that difficult.
To demonstrate this you need to convey what it is like to be a human being.
This is easier than it sounds. Do you know why?
Because you are a human being and have plenty of experience to draw on for your response.
What sorts of things demonstrate an understanding of human experience?
Let’s have a look at some important and easy to develop aspects:
Obviously, writing about human experience is not that hard.
It doesn’t have to be a mystical or opaque goal, you just have to represent the kinds of experience you have had, that other people will have shared.
Drawing on human qualities such as the four listed above, or combining some of them together, will give you a narrative that demonstrates these kinds of insights.
This point builds upon the knowledge and insights from the first criteria.
If you have a solid grasp on human experience, which you should as a person, then your over the line already!
The theme you have to discuss is stated clearly – aspects of human experiences – the sorts of human emotions we discussed above.
The key phrase in this point is “explains and critically evaluates how texts represent”.
What is this instructing you to do?
The second part of this criteria that you want to focus on is the phrase “detailed and relevant textual evidence.”
If you are unsure of how to use evidence, then you should read part 2 of our Beginner’s Guide to Acing HSC English.
This point is concerned with how you reflect on your own work and how you see it in relation to the texts you have been set for study.
“Makes relevant and insightful connections” is instructing you to explain why you have made the representational choices that you have in your creative text.
This is a way of assessing your critical thinking and understanding of the core text.
The final criteria is directly concerned with the presentation of Part B. Let’s take a look and see what you need to do.
The key verb here is “communicates.” This tells you that it is your communication skills that are being assessed.
Tasks such as the above will be forms of assessment that you will face in Year 11, too.
The other aspects of the criteria are easier to define:
While the specific preparation you will need to do will vary depending on what the specifics of your task are, we can give you a solid step-by-step process to follow every time you need to create a multimodal presentation. And that is what we will do now!
Each presentation task and its marking criteria will be different, but the process for approaching these tasks needs to be process driven and systematic. Let’s look at a foolproof step-by-step process:
Read through this process once or twice and let it sink in.
Do you have a rough understanding of the logic of this process? Make sure you have a clear understanding of the task you have been set before you begin trying to put it together.
For the purpose of this Guide, we will use the NESA sample assessment task as an example.
Let’s quickly look at it again.
Remember, the sample task is for Common Module: Text and Human Experience and is on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. This sample assessment has two parts:
Compose an imaginative text of no more than 700 words to reflect your understanding of human experiences related to one of the following three areas that you have focused on in class:
The type of text you choose may be a short story, a script, a performance poem, or another type of text approved by your teacher. Your teacher will provide three lessons in class for you to write, conference and/or edit your work and the final version will be submitted on the due date.
This is the creative part of the task. You must produce an imaginative text of your own based on an existing one. You will submit it, and once you have received a mark, you will have to give a presentation.
This presentation is Part B of the task, described below:
In class, on the due date, you will give a presentation and explain and evaluate how your composition represents your understanding of human experiences and how this understanding has been reflected and/or challenged in one piece of self-selected related material. The presentation to the class should be no more than three minutes in length and must include the use of a visual aid.
As this guide is focused on producing a multimodal presentation, we will skip Part A. If you need help with producing creatives and imaginative recreations you should refer to the other parts of this Guide:
Now, we will use Part B of the task as the example. Let’s take a look at the steps in detail!
This may seem obvious, but it is an important step that many take for granted.
Make sure that you have a comprehensive understanding of the text and detailed notes before you begin putting the presentation together.
This is because:
Some tasks will ask you to choose and analyse a supplementary text you select yourself.
This sample assessment task, for example, asks you to find and analyse a supplementary text for The Crucible by Arthur Miller.
The first step in completing this task would be to find an appropriate related text – for example, Phillip K Dick’s short story The Minority Report is a good text for exploring ideas of trust and justice.
As we discussed above, the assessment notification will give you:
If you are unsure how to do this, you should reread the explanation we provided above and read Part 4 of this Guide: Understanding English Notifications and Assessment Tasks.
Remember, the sample task has two parts:
Before you begin planning you need to understand what you are being asked to do.
It is important that you unpack the question as you would for an essay, regardless of the type of task you have been set.
Part B of the sample assessment has the following instruction:
“You will give a presentation and explain and evaluate how your composition represents your understanding of human experiences and how this understanding has been reflected and/or challenged in one piece of self-selected related material. The presentation to the class should be no more than three minutes in length and must include the use of a visual aid.”
Let’s unpack what this is asking you to do.
This task is difficult for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it has several components. Secondly, you only have 3 minutes. You will need to plan this carefully. Let’s think about how to do this.
Before you write and draw or produce your slides, you need to plan out what you will talk about and how you will structure it. This is why you should plan things first.
The things you need to consider when planning a multimodal presentation are:
When you have figured out the basics above, you want to map out the project and plan out the structure. Ask yourself the following questions:
Returning to the sample task, what do we need to do? Let’s break this down into specifics:
You may not be able to produce all of the visual aspects of an assessment task first, but you should begin with the core elements.
If you are doing a slide presentation, you can always come back to the final slides that relate to your speech when that is finished.
What you must do is produce the central visual element. This will take time and skill.
You will need to think about how to visually represent aspects of your text from characters to themes.
Remember to use the tools at your disposal to produce these. In addition to software programs like Microsoft PowerPoint, MSPaint, and Adobe Photoshop, there are a wide variety available on the internet for free:
Once you have produced your core visual element or elements, get feedback on them.
Make sure that you ask your friends, teachers, or parents if they can understand how your visual representation embodies your ideas.
Matrix English students always get timely feedback from tutors and teachers about their assessment tasks. You will obviously have to explain your choices, but this will help you plan out your speech!
Let’s think about how you could apply this to your assessment task. You could create the following visual elements:
There are many different options at your disposal. You are only limited by technology, imagination, and the amount of time you have to present.
Once you have put the visual element together, you’re now ready to produce the speech element.
Let’s look at how to do that.
Speeches are different to essays, but contain the same structural elements.
To write your speech do the following:
Because speeches are limited in length, you don’t have much space to talk about lots of things.
A good speech focuses in detail on one or two ideas.
Let’s put this in perspective using our task:
This makes our task hard. What do we discuss? Justice, trust, honesty? These are all key ideas in the texts.
This is when we must rely on our knowledge of the texts to see which one will be the most enlightening topic for our audience and visual element!
Once you have produced a speech, you need to proof and edit it. Make sure that you:
Editing your work helps you avoid tossing marks away unnecessarily.
Matrix English Students are taught how to proof and edit their work. If you are unsure where to start, read Part 7 of our Beginner’s Guide to Acing HSC English: How to Edit Your Essay.
Now you have the two parts – the visual element and the speech – you need to combine them together and practise the performance.
You want to rehearse several times. The more thoroughly you know your speech, the less reliant you will be on palm cards or scripts.
A good performance seems natural.
If you know the material well enough you should only need the palm cards as prompts if you get stuck.
Practising regularly and in advance will help you manage stage fright and anxiety.
Some suggestions for rehearsing effectively are:
Now that you have created, written, and prepared, you are ready to go forth and achieve that Band 6 result with your performance!
