TRANSCRIPT 			Speaking & Listening

Student Sample: Stage S4 Standard Video 2  

Transcription:

Today we’re doing the research review as part of your Middle Ages Enquiry Assignment.  Now the reason we’re doing this is because when students have the chance to stop and reflect on their work mid-way through their work, chance to get some opinions about what they’re doing and think more deeply about what they’re doing, then often their work is much better at the end, in the way that when you watch a video of yourself doing a presentation you’re able to improve that presentation the next time that you do it.  So today some of you will have a chance to do that.  The actual task that you’ll be doing is you’ll be presenting the findings of your research assignment so far:  what you’ve found and how you’ve found it, so your process.  You’ll be doing that in that fairly formal way to the group.  Then I’ll be asking some questions which are encouraging you to look at the way that we mark your work and also the way that we see if it’s a good piece of work.  And we’ll also be encouraging you to respond to questions that are asked by your peers, by the students in the audience.  As you’re doing that, when you give the presentation, as I said it’s got some formality to it, so we’re expecting you to have a clear beginning, middle and end; we’re expecting your language to be, include full sentences and probably some words that are specific to this topic; and also we’d like you to organise your thoughts logically when you speak in that first section, alright?  Also, when you respond to people’s questions or comments or suggestions, if you could just consider, respond thoughtfully to those questions and show that you understand them.

I started my assignment by finishing my lotus diagram and I completed eight questions for each of my subjects, I mean um, yeah, that I picked.  And the one that interested me most was the Black Death.  I found a couple of questions and I researched them, and the first one was, “What were the effects of the plague?”  The answer that I found in a couple of resources was you will start off with headaches, fever, dizziness, then you’ll start to vomit.  You will start to get a white coated tongue, you’ll get lymph glands in your groin, your armpits and neck will swell, and you’ll form this sort of black-blue lumps on your skin:  they call them ‘buboes’.  They’ll often leak pus and blood, and it will start to smell very badly, which leads to my next question which is, “What cures did the locals use?”  The locals used a lot of questions, like a lot of cures, but they weren’t really effective but they think they were.  They would kill cats and dogs and they would burn them to ash; they would sit in a sewer cause they thought that the sewer smelled better than them; and they will place chicken bottoms on the lumps that they had; they would even sniff human waste; they would burn pine and lemon leaves; and they would even attach leeches that would make the lumps, they would cut the lumps open to remove the bad blood that they thought existed in the lumps. 

What is your plan for finishing the assignment?

I’m planning to make my answers smaller and maybe combine more resources, so yeah.

Okay.  Have you asked your questions in a way that helps you to find the information you want, or do you think you need to change them to be more general or specific?

I actually did change my questions before because some of them I could not find answers the way they were written, so I changed them around.

Okay, that’s part of the process, that’s good.  And if you still need to you have that choice.

Yeah.

How did you make sure you got a wide range of sources?

Well I had the questions in my, the other piece of paper that teachers give us.  Um, yeah, I wrote the questions and I had an answer from each of the resources and I combined the resource together to make one answer.

Yeah, yeah.  And what type of sources did you use for those, and what number of sources?

I used three resources:  I used and encyclopaedia, our text book and there’s a TV show that it’s based on the medieval life.