Communication and Design in Multimodal Presentations

Effective educational presentations not only communicate meaning through structured content, but indicate the attitudes of presenters and their empathic engagement with the audience. This paper considers the design of multimodal presentations, specifically examining the functional and integrative roles of gestures in the communicative process when materials are presented by experienced teachers. A gestural coding scheme is used to describe similarities and differences between the presenters when dealing with the same topics under three presentation formats. These data give useful insights into how the visual, verbal and gestural modalities are used to effect communicative and educational intentions.