Clarification details
Updated December 2017. This document has been updated in its entirety to address issues that arose from moderation.
Focus of the standard
This standard assesses students’ ability to develop, structure and sustain ideas in a visual text. This means that students focus primarily on the visual mode. The text must be ‘stand-alone’ rather than a component within an oral presentation, or an illustration of a written text type. Voiceover or written text should not be a commentary or explanation of the ideas in a visual text.
Text type
Choice of text type is important, as the text must include both visual components (such as images, sequence, symbols, colour) and verbal components (such as dialogue or quotations). Visual and verbal language features appropriate to that text type must be used deliberately, precisely and with control. Some points to note:
- the key words of the standard are ‘develop and sustain ideas’, therefore the visual text requires a sequence or series of images
- designing a cover for a videogame or a book, for example, is unlikely to allow students to sustain developed ideas
- text types such as storyboards are usually used for formative planning and design, so may not give students the opportunity to meet the crafting and control of language features that is required
- digital presentations, graphic stories and static image sequences are some visual text types that have been successfully developed by students to meet the standard
- ideas can sometimes be sufficiently developed verbally, but insufficiently developed visually, for example a slide show that includes paragraphs of written text and images that illustrate that written content is unlikely to meet the standard
- ideas might be developed and sustained in the verbal component of a dramatic performance, e.g. dialogue, lyrics, screen text, but the presentation might have limited use of visual language features.
Using found images
Images cannot be a literal communication of ideas. If the student is developing ideas from a source text that already has visual images, such as a film or a website, images from that visual text cannot be used to develop the same idea that they communicate in the source text. Found images must be manipulated in such a way that the final visual text is original.
Support materials
The New Zealand Association for the Teaching of English (NZATE) Visual Text resource provides additional examples of the assessment of visual texts at all grades of the standard. This is available from the NZATE website.