Some quick notes from November’s  3-Minute Paper — great energy and a lively cross-institution discussion.

Key insights (very brief):

• Teach modal alignment explicitly (not as an add-on), and earlier in courses.
• Poster-style/static slides often improve focus and alignment vs. dense slide decks.
• Make intersemiotic relations explicit (repetition; + more synonymy/hyponymy).
• Alignment = rhetorical choice (audience + purpose), not decoration.
• Growing need for AI/prompt literacy to generate visuals that actually align.
• Teacher confidence with disciplinary visuals shapes whether this gets taught at all.
• Good teaching “realia”: flowcharts, infographics, posters, 3MT.

The paper discussed was – Fan, Y.-S. & Khattak, M. I. (2025) ‘Investigating verbal-visual mode interaction in medical audio-slide presentations’, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 78 (November 2025). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2025.101584

Slides from the event