| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語系應用語言學與英語教學碩士班 === 102 === PowerPoint presentations are one kind of digital text that are widely used in many areas, and almost every college student will need to make one as part of their schoolwork. Adopting a multimodal literacy perspective, PowerPoint presentations, particularly presentation slides, are viewed as multimodal texts in the present study. The aims of the current study are to explore college students’ strategies for making a conclusion in PowerPoint presentations, and to examine the strategies they employed in the design of their presentation slides.
A total of 35 junior students participated in the present study. All the participants were English majors in the English Department of a university in Taiwan, and they all had prior experience of designing and presenting multimodal texts in the form of PowerPoint presentations. The participants were required to give two PowerPoint presentations, with one at the beginning of the semester as a baseline performance, and the other in the middle of the semester after they had received formal training in presentation skills and the design of slides. The participants’ PowerPoint slides, from both first and second presentations, were used as the primary research data to understand of their concluding strategies and whether or not their multimodal literacy developed. The students’ presentational videos and self-reflective writings were used as the secondary data to help the interpretations of the research findings.
The results showed that in the first presentation, just under a quarter of the students made concluding slides, although these often had weak content or even no clear conclusions. Encouragingly, the majority of students were able to create more effective presentations, particularly conclusions, after receiving explicit instruction. The three most commonly used concluding strategies were summarizing, calling for action, and sharing feelings. Moreover, the analytical results of the focal students’ design of multimodal texts showed that they all significantly improved their work in terms of visual and textual content, as well as overall cohesion, when comparing their first and second sets of presentation slides. It can thus be concluded that the explicit instruction was needed and that it was able to raise the students’ understanding of presentation design and the use of concluding strategies, thus strengthening their multimodal literacy.
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