Presentational communication: producing coherent signed texts
Presentational communication asks you to produce a coherent signed text for an audience: a short talk, narrative, explanation, or persuasive message. It is not a conversation, so you must plan and deliver the whole text yourself. The exam looks for organisation, clarity, audience awareness, and control of NZSL grammar over several sentences.
Core rules
- Plan the visual structure before signing: what is established where, what order the audience needs, and how you will conclude.
- Use a clear time frame at the start, then keep tense consistent with time markers and non-manual signals.
- Organise with topic-comment structure: name the topic, then comment on it; do not follow English subject-verb-object order mechanically.
- Use space deliberately: one location per referent; move between locations to show interaction.
- Use classifiers for size, shape, movement, and arrangement; use role shift for quoted speech and viewpoints.
- Sign to the audience, not to your hands: eye contact, pace, and repetition for emphasis are part of coherence.
Worked example
Task: present a one-minute talk about last weekend. Plan: 'LAST WEEKEND' (time frame), then 'SATURDAY MORNING MARKET' established left, then 'FRIEND MEET' at left, then role shift: friend asks 'YOU WANT COFFEE?', then shift back: you answer YES, then 'AFTERNOON PARK' established right, then a classifier showing a walking route, then concluding comment 'GOOD DAY'. Reasoning: the time frame orients the audience; left and right locations separate two events; role shift makes the quoted exchange clear without English quotation marks; the classifier carries the route; the conclusion signals the text is finished. Without the spatial plan, the same signs become a list.
Traps
- Writing an English script and glossing it sign by sign; NZSL grammar disappears.
- No opening orientation or closing signal, so the audience does not know when the text begins or ends.
- Changing a referent’s location mid-text.
- Fingerspelling words that have established signs.
- Freezing facial expression, which removes question, negation, and emphasis cues.
- Signing too fast for the audience or dropping eye contact to monitor your own hands.