Year 7
English Support Materials
English snapshot: Presentations
English/Literacy/Interacting with others
| Content Description | Relevant aspects of the Achievement Standards |
|---|---|
|
Plan, rehearse and deliver presentations, selecting and sequencing appropriate content and multimodal elements to promote a point of view or enable a new way of seeing (ACELY 1720) |
Students understand how the selection of a variety of language features can influence an audience. They understand how to draw on personal knowledge, textual analysis and other sources to express or challenge a point of view. They create texts showing how language features and images from other texts can be combined for effect. Students create structured and coherent texts for a range of purposes and audiences. They make presentations and contribute actively to class and group discussions, using language features to engage the audience. When creating and editing texts they demonstrate understanding of grammar, use a variety of more specialised vocabulary, accurate spelling and punctuation. |
Nature of the assessment
Year 7 teachers collaborated to develop an end-of-semester assessment.
Purpose of the assessment
To assess students’ ability to give a short speech. The teachers decided to not allow students to include multimodal elements because they wanted the students to focus on using language to influence an audience.
Stage in the teaching sequence
End of semester
Background
The Year 7 teachers developed a speaking task that involved the students giving a two-minute speech. In the speech, the students had to persuade their audience to participate in an environmental sustainability initiative such as taking shorter showers.
Assessment process
Each teacher selected five students (who roughly represented the range of ability in the class) to give their speech. The speeches were videoed (using iPads). The two teachers agreed on two broad criteria for assessing the quality of the speeches: persuasiveness (the use of rhetorical devices, selection of facts to substantiate argument, deliberate language choices) and presentation (maintaining eye contact, appropriate use of body language, conveying a sense of purpose). They viewed the 10 videoed speeches and agreed on a rank ordering of the performances for each of the criterion. They made a note of the features of each performance and identified the features that distinguished a better performance from a weaker performance. Based on this work the teachers refined and expanded their marking criteria; they marked the videoed performances and cross checked their marking.
The teachers also compared the performances to the Achievement Standard exemplar and agreed which performances represented satisfactory performance, and which performances were of a higher or lower standard than the satisfactory range.
Using the information
The teachers provided detailed feedback to each student confirming which aspects of their speech were persuasive, which aspects did not help advance their argument and ways they could further improve the structure of their speeches and their delivery.
The teachers used the assessment as a main component of their end-of-year reporting. They also met to discuss to review the task and to reflect on and refine their teaching programs for the following year.