Performing PowerPoint lectures: examining the extent of slide-text integration into lecturers’ spoken expositions

ABSTRACTThe PowerPoint-assisted lecture (slide-lecture) is a common lecturing approach in higher education, in spite of much criticism of its use. Its popularity is facilitated by its affordances for multimodal instructional design, e.g. text with images and speech. Little is known about the integration of different semiotic modalities within the instructional communication practices of slide-lectures nor the learning conditions that they create. Given that text bulletpoints are ubiquitous in slide-lectures, and may impose linearity into instructional communications, this study explores the extent to which lecturing speech is systematically coordinated with slide-text. Eleven slide-lectures given in psychology departments across the UK were recorded and transcribed. Patterns of semantic matches between speech and slide-text were analysed to produce similarity scores for each lecturer. Lectures were scored using an integration scoring system of 0–1, with 1 indicating a perfect match of speech and slide-tex...