This module aims to guide experienced Year 12 students towards preparing for their feature writing task for the Senior English curriculum. It focuses on the way text structures, evaluative language, and attribution combine to engage and persuade an audience. The documentary film Ai Weiwei: Never sorry is used as inspiration for writing practice.
Media, journalism, feature story, Ai Weiwei,
Issue: the callous mistreatment of Chinese people by their government
Question: Why did the Chinese government refuse to properly acknowledge the tragedy and its causes?
Sorry About Sichuan
The Chinese government refused to properly acknowledge their greatest natural catastrophe of the twenty-first century. Julie Arnold investigates how the Chinese government could be so callous to its own people.
Her anguish ....
More than 70 000 people died in the Schezuan earthquake.
This term, you will explore some of the big issues, the universal themes, the things that you get passionate about or stir our curiosity - love, life, death, injustice, power, war, the environment, and so on. You will explore how some of these are represented in movie-length documentary films, noticing how film directors use the grammatical resources at their disposal to position or persuade viewers to accept their point of of view.
The learning in this unit directly depends on the learning in the Year 11 Reading Australia unit, where you were inspired by representations of Australians in poetry to write a feature story. It is also builds upon concepts learned in th Year 11 Representations in Media unit, through which you learned about the ways journalists make deliberate choices about the text structures and language features of news stories to privilege or marginalise, promote or reject selected ideas, attitudes & values. Other Year 11 work, including narrative writing and multmodal presentations were also important in developing your skills and readiness for this unit. Looking ahead, you will use what you learn this term in the remainder of Year 12, in particular the learning can be directly applied to your multimodal film analysis in Term II, for which you must link central elements in our class novel to a film of your choice.
Your assessment this term will be to write a general feature story investigating one of the issues explored in a documenatry feature film of your choice. You must directly reference your selected documentary and at least two other relevant information texts. Your teacher will demonstrate how to go about this task using the documentary film Ai Wei Wei: Never sorry and focused learning episodes will relate primarily to those text structure elements and language features that many students found difficult last year, including: the use of attribution in developing angles and arguments; control of tense across the text; and the strategic use of images and captions to enhance the persuasive power of the feature story.
QUEENSLAND SENIOR ENGLISH SYLLABUS DIMENSIONS AND OBJE
Dimension 1: Understanding and responding to contexts
Students examine how texts are structured and organised for particular purposes and then apply this knowledge to produce different types of texts for particular purposes.
By the conclusion of the course, through reading, viewing, writing, designing, listening and speaking/signing, students should:
use genre patterns and conventions to achieve particular purposes
select, sequence and organise subject matter to support opinions and perspectives
establish roles of the writer/speaker/signer and relationships with audiences.
Dimension 2: Understanding and controlling textual features
Students understand and control textual features, in a variety of contexts.
By the conclusion of the course, through reading, viewing, writing, designing, listening and speaking/signing, students should:
use grammar and language structures for particular purposes
use cohesive devices to develop ideas and connect parts of texts
use vocabulary for particular purposes
use mode-appropriate features to achieve particular purposes.
Dimension 3: Creating and evaluating meaning
Students create and evaluate texts to demonstrate how and why meaning is made.
By the conclusion of the course, through reading, viewing, writing, designing, listening and speaking/signing, students should:
use and evaluate ideas, attitudes and values that underpin texts and influence audiences
create and evaluate perspectives and representations of concepts, identities, times and places in texts
use aesthetic features to achieve purposes and evaluate their effects in texts.
Watch this video and think about the how students and teachers can become frustrated with each other at high school.
Some study that I used to know: What do you remember from high school?
Comment: What do you think you'll remember next year? In five years? Forever? Then, comment on the comments of other students, building on or challenging their ideas to extend the discussion. Start with @Name, inserting the name of the student you are commenting on.
2. Collect your folio and other information from your teacher and complete this SWOT analysis in your English exercise book.
3. What do you want to achieve in English this year? How will you make it happen? Complete:
Write your goals and actions in your English exercise book. You might want to click on the link, if you need some help thinking this through.
Then, comment on the comments of other students, building on or challenging their ideas to extend the discussion. Start with @Name, inserting the name of the student you are commenting on.
Students have, by now logged on and had some initial discussions in Scholar. They will have read and annotated a feature story, using PS12.1.1.1 as a revision of the metalanguage concerning structure.
LEARNING INTENTION: understand the generic patterns (text structures) of a feature article that draw in the reader and keep them engaged
SUCCESS CRITERIA:
Correctly annotate a feature story
identify the angles and arguments
Contribute to discussion using the metalanguage of feature writing
Articulate an opinion in response to the main idea of the feature story
Comment: These will need to be separate comments on the community board.
Then, comment on the comments of other students, building on or challenging their ideas to extend the discussion. Start with @Name, inserting the name of the student you are commenting on.
The original lesson planning documents:
Make sure the level 3 contentions are added to the updates on the community in time for this lesson.
LEARNING INTENTION: You will be able to establish an attitude in relation to an issue in a feature story and scale up or down the force of your meaning.
SUCCESS CRITERIA:
WRITING PRACTICE - for your exercise book
To demonstrate that you can not only understand attitude when you read it, but you can also apply it to your own writing, rewrite the headline, byline, lead paragraph and the beginning of the narrative hook. Create the opposite meaning about Alice Springs.
Comment: Write a PEEL paragraph explaining how successful the text structure and language features work together to draw in the reader and persuade us to accept his point of view about Alice Springs. Use vocabulary from PS12.1.1 and PS12.1.2 in your answer.
Then, comment on the comments of other students, building on or challenging their ideas to extend the discussion. Start with @Name, inserting the name of the student you are commenting on.
LEARNING INTENTION: extend our knowledge of the way textual features combine to make an effective feature article by considering the concept of attribution
SUCCESS CRITERIA:
Read this before you begin:
1. Okay, now for a little contextual knowledge, watch a few minutes of this video excerpt, so you are familiar with the actor referred to in the feature article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f71BrBQFxCU
2.
3. Now you're ready to read the article.
4.
Comment: Write a PEEL paragraph answering this question:
How effective is Robin Pagnamenta in convincing the reader to agree with her opinion* about the role of Bollywood in Indian attitudes to women and sexuality? Refer to our 3 textual features (structure, language, intertextual references).
* yet another word for main idea
Then, comment on the comments of other students, building on or challenging their ideas to extend the discussion. Start with @Name, inserting the name of the student you are commenting on.
Assign this to the updates for homework:
Write a PEEL paragraph answering this question:
How effective is Robin Pagnamenta in convincing the reader to agree with her opinion* about the role of Bollywood in Indian attitudes to women and sexuality? Refer to our 3 textual features (structure, language, intertextual references).
* yet another word for main idea
Reading visual images effectively is not a completely different skill to reading worded text (main idea, inference, vocab). However, it can be useful to use a specific strategy for analysing visual images.
Selecting effective images and writing a caption to support them was a weakness for many of you in your feature writing last year. Notice how this professional journalist has done it. Look at the images and captions on other articles too.
If you want to do some extra work on this, select some images and have students write captions for them, eg. This is a feature article about ______ that attempts to persuade the reader that ________. Write a suitable caption for it.
LEARNING INTENTION: Find inspiration for a feature story in a documentary film.
SUCCESS CRITERIA:
Try researching here: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/global-culture/global-art-architecture/a/ai-weiwei-remembering-and-the-politics-of-dissent
2. As you watch, make a list of issues or themes (expressed as noun groups, eg. government surveillance).
3. THINK-PAIR-SHARE with your class. You need to get this thing right so you can do it when you watch your own documentary.
4. As a class group, select a short excerpt that is relevant for one of the themes. Write a description of it that might be used as a narrative hook.
Plan to watch the documentary
Ai Wei Wei: Never sorry
Alison Klayman documents the life and work of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. She showcases his artistic process as he prepares for a museum exhibition, his relationships with family members and his clashes with the government.
Initial release: June 14, 2012 (Germany)
Director: Alison Klayman
Running time: 1h 31m
Screenplay: Alison Klayman
Music composed by: Ilan Isakov
For the joint rewrite, model this process: select the issue of interest – create a question – answer the question. Use this answer to your writing position in relation to the topic, then us evaluative language to establish an attitude and graduate meaning through the text structures in PS 12.1.1.
LEARNING INTENTIONS: Analyse, evaluate and incorporate themes from a documentary for a feature article.
and keep thinking about how structure, attribution and attitudinal language work together to create a cohesive argument.
SUCESS CRITERIA:
This is an area you struggled with last year. Work through the argument activities with your teacher, then complete the mini project.
This will be a Reading-to-Learn style lesson, completed over two periods. After sharing the original lesson plan, teacher should select an argumument from a feature story (either from the Reading and Responding section of the unit or other):
LEARNING INTENTION:
change attitudinal language to alter meaning
undermine an argument
conclude a feature article with consideration to the persuasive intent and attitude of the text
SUCCESS CRITERIA:
alter attitudinal language for effect
make rebuttals in an argument.
identify the concluding technique in a feature article and apply it to your own writing
FOCUS - ATTITUDE
FOCUS - REBUTTING
CONCLUDING YOUR FEATURE ARTICLE
There isn't time in this unit for a third mini-project on ending the feature - better for students to get on with the main project at this stage.
An option would be to run an optional workshop on using extended metaphors.
Title: Image by geralt (Source);