Presentation
Give a spoken presentation that communicates information, ideas and opinions
Updated March 2025. The section on feedback and feed forward has been updated.
Feedback and feed forward on drafts
Further to the updated 2025 Ministry of Education Conditions of Assessment, teacher feedback and feed forward on students’ drafts is not permitted. Teacher involvement during the assessment event is limited to providing students with support on the technical aspects of their work only, e.g. audio or visual quality. Assessors must not provide feedback on student language.
All language should be the student’s own work. Complex language with few or no errors may indicate an authenticity issue.
Content
These standards involve communicating information and expressing and justifying ideas and opinions. There should be evidence of each of these within the presentation.
The best presentations are to the point and close to the allocated times. Development does not equal length. Suggested time for a Level 2 presentation is two minutes.
The purpose of this presentation is delivery to an audience. This could be either a face to face or an online audience. Tasks should ensure that students will have a context which requires a presentation as opposed to a piece of writing, e.g. a video/podcast application for a place on an exchange.
Communication and language
As this is a spoken presentation, inconsistencies do not relate solely to errors in vocabulary or grammar. Inconsistencies in communication may relate to the following: language features, pronunciation, intonation, rhythm patterns, delivery speed, audibility, stress patterns, or tones. Incorrect language/inconsistencies will affect the grade to the extent that they hinder communication.
Language features should be taken into account when allocating a grade. A student who speaks very quickly without pausing appropriately for new sentences may have a presentation which would receive Excellence as a piece of writing, but which will receive a Merit for this standard. Inconsistencies in delivery speed and stress patterns may mean that the communication of the message is hindered. Delivery may ultimately affect the grade.
The nature of the language features used will also be determined by the fact that this is a spoken presentation, e.g. at Level 2 this could be the use of rhetorical questions.
Delivery of presentation
Cue cards/text should only be used for support, and students may not read their presentation in its entirety. If they do so, they cannot be awarded the standard.
On this page
Interact
Interact to share information and justify ideas and opinions in different situations
Updated March 2025. This document has been updated to include 2025 changes to the standard and the Conditions of Assessment.
Language features
The 2025 standard (version 3) states that interactions will be unscripted and unrehearsed.
A repertoire of language features and strategies to maintain the interaction is required for this standard. For this reason, it does not produce evidence towards this standard if students write and learn scripted roleplays by heart, or otherwise prepare the total interaction beforehand. Indicators of the ability to maintain an interaction will not be evident in such exchanges. The 2025 Conditions of Assessment require the teachers to closely supervise the process of evidence collection to ensure that the unscripted/unrehearsed requirement is met.
Features and strategies such as pausing, negotiating meaning, prompting, seeking clarification, etc. can only be seen in evidence when the student is unaware of all questions that are asked, and has not prepared all answers. For this reason, the use of cue cards would also render evidence invalid.
Interactions where students can react in a genuine way, and where they are able to naturally control the direction of the interaction, give students the opportunity to meet the criteria.
Range
The standard calls for a minimum of two interactions, and these must be in different situations. This will mean that the context and/or purpose and/or type will be different for each interaction, e.g. discussing what they do to keep healthy will necessitate different language from planning an exchange trip.
Assessing the collection of evidence
The grade will be awarded for the collection of interactions assessed as a whole, i.e. each interaction will not be assessed individually – the grade will be derived from the overall quality of the work. Students must show that they are working consciously and reasonably consistently at the level, rather than accidentally and occasionally.
Approximately four minutes individual contribution is suggested for Level 2 sufficiency of evidence.
Language
Incorrect language/inconsistencies will only affect a grade if they hinder communication. It is important to note that accuracy is not a criterion of this standard. In a realistic conversation by learners of a second language, errors are natural and should not be overly penalised.
Whilst inconsistencies that do not affect communication will not affect the grade, Excellence requires sufficient language, outside the language with errors, that contributes to the criteria of the successful use of a range of language.
At Level 2, students need to move beyond simply supplying information and into justifying expressed ideas and opinions. This can be done by giving evidence or explanations which support these views and/or the views of others. Over the collected evidence there should be evidence of both sharing and justifying.
Writing
Write a variety of text types to convey information, ideas and opinions in genuine contexts
Updated March 2025. The sections on feedback and feed forward and the use of resources have been updated.
Feedback and feed forward on drafts
Further to the updated 2025 Ministry of Education Conditions of Assessment, teacher feedback and feed forward on students’ drafts is not permitted. Teacher involvement during the assessment event is limited to providing students with support on the technical aspects of their work only, i.e. audio or visual quality. Assessors must not provide feedback on student language.
All language should be the student’s own work. Complex language with few or no errors may indicate an authenticity issue.
Use of resources
The use of chatbots, generative AI, paraphrasing tools, spell checkers, or other tools that can automatically generate the target language content is not permitted, and material generated by these tools should not be submitted as part of the student’s work.
All sources should be appropriately acknowledged and any work aided by these resources significantly modified using the student’s own language.
Text type
The context and/or purpose and/or text type (a minimum of two) should be different for each piece. For example, a blog posting on the class language site, justifying a proposed destination for a trip to a target language country and creating a healthy lifestyles brochure.
Curriculum level
The standard requires students to use language to communicate information and express and justify ideas and opinions. Whilst students are free to use all language they have at their disposal, a Level 2 task cannot expect students to use language beyond that required to achieve the standard. To achieve the standard there needs to be evidence of each of the above within the texts.
Assessing the collection of evidence
The grade will be awarded for the pieces of writing assessed as a whole, i.e. each piece will not be assessed individually. The grade will be derived from the overall quality of the work. Students must show that they are working consciously and reasonably consistently at the level, rather than accidentally and occasionally.
Incorrect language/inconsistencies will only affect a grade if they hinder communication. Whilst inconsistencies that do not affect communication will not affect the grade, for Excellence there needs to be sufficient language, outside the language with errors, that contributes to the requirement for capable selection and successful use of language.
Word limits
The sample tasks suggest the following approximate word/character/kana count for Level 2: 400 characters for Chinese, 800 kana for Japanese, or 400 words for all other languages. These are a realistic expectation of the amount that may be needed to provide sufficient evidence from which to make a judgement. At all times quality is more important than quantity.