Objective A: Comprehending spoken and visual text
"Comprehending spoken and visual text encompasses aspects of listening and viewing, and involves the student in constructing meaning and interpreting spoken and visual text to understand how images presented with oral text interplay to convey ideas, values and attitudes. Engaging with text requires the student to think creatively and critically about what is viewed, and to be aware of opinions, attitudes and cultural references presented in the visual text. The student might, for example, reflect on feelings and actions, imagine himself or herself in another’s situation, gain new perspectives and develop empathy, based on what he or she has understood in the text."
As appropriate to the phase, the student is expected to be able to:
- listen for specific purposes and respond to show understanding
- interpret visual text that is presented with spoken text
- engage with the text by supporting opinion and personal response with evidence and examples from the text.
Here is my interpretation of the passage:
- Videos with scripts should be considered as written and visual texts, but not spoken and visual texts as students will be reading the text.
- There is no requirement regarding how long the text should be, as long as the text is complex enough and the language is at an appropriate level to allow students achieve the highest band level of the criterion.
- The design of the comprehension questions should allow the progression of thinking.
- Unlike criterion B (comprehending written and visual text), students might not be able to go back and relisten to the text again. A lot of concentration will be needed for completing the task. Students must be explicitly taught how to take notes in sequential order to help them identify main ideas, supporting details, cause and effect, author's point of view and so on in a text.
- Sufficient formative assessment tasks should be used to help students develop active listening skills and making sense of the oral text and visual text.
- Multimedia authentic texts are strongly recommended to help students develop skills of this objective.
- Since students are required to use their creative and critical thinking skills to understand what is heard and viewed, the two thinking skills must be explicitly taught in conjunction with communication skills.