Presentation Schedule
Instruction, Observation, Reflection, Application: A Replicable Cycle for Teaching Multimodal Aspects in Academic Oral Presentations (101658)
Session Chair: Raphaela Tkotzyk
Sunday, 8 February 2026 10:50
Session: Session 1
Room: Opal 103 (Level 1)
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Effective interaction of multimodal resources, such as speech, gesture, and slides (SGS), is essential for communicating meaning in academic oral presentations. However, students often struggle to integrate these modes coherently (Smotrova & Toh, 2024), while current pedagogies tend to teach them in isolation (Carney, 2014; Rowley-Jolivet, 2002), rather than as an interdependent ecology (Harrison, 2021). This study proposes a pedagogy for teaching SGS interplay through a cycle of Instruction, Observation, Reflection, and Application. Inspired by Lim, Cope & Kalantzis's (2022) work on multimodal literacy, our pedagogy aims at improving the students’ use of SGS interplay in their presentations through: 1) explicit teaching of its functions (animate, disclose, depict, etc.), using videos of peer presenters; 2) guided peer feedback; 3) self-reflection; and 4) application in their final presentations. The pedagogy was implemented in post-graduate research presentation classes, where students conducted guided peer observations, video-based reflections, and iterative application of the taught strategies in their presentations. Our data include the video recordings of student presentations before and after the intervention, student peer feedback and reflections. Our findings indicate that most students developed a heightened awareness about and a more deliberate use of speech, gesture, and slides to convey the meaning more effectively in their final presentations. This paper contributes to research on teaching multimodality in oral presentations by presenting a pedagogy for developing an effective use of multimodal interplay. It also highlights the role of peer videos, peer feedback, and metalanguage in scaffolding students’ awareness of multimodal meaning-making.
Authors:
Tetyana Smotrova, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Anita Toh, National University of Singapore, Singapore
About the Presenter(s)
Dr Tetyana Smotrova is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at National University of Singapore in Singapore
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