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.

These are your learning goals for this unit.

Here are your proficiency scales, for reference.

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.

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

Read and annotate this feature story, then complete the first two levels of the 3 Level Guide, to check your understanding.

Highlight your evidence and check in with a partner.

Comment: These will need to be separate comments on the community board.

1. Too much space is devoted to the narrative hook here.
2. Parenting is a job for a man and a woman together.

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:   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:

• Evidence (words and phrases) that communicate emotion
• Evidence (words and phrases) that communicate judgements about people
• Evidence (words and phrases) that communicate an evaluation of places, circumstances, objects, events, policies – ‘things’

Destroyed_20in_20Alice.docx

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:

• Accurate annotations on a feature article (for attributions, text structure and language choices)
• A paragraph summarising the main idea and supporting arguments of the feature article
• A paragraph evaluating the way the author has combined the textual features to construct this feature article

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.

Discuss your prediction with a partner

3. Now you're ready to read the article.

Your purpose for reading is to see how the argument is constructed through series of angles and arguments, which rely on external voices (attribution). As you go, you will automatically notice those things we’ve already studied in PS12.1.1 ans PS12.1.2

4.

Work with your friends to prepare to summarise the article by examining the arguments.

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.

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.

Divide this image into 9 squares.

 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.

Complete this task.

LEARNING INTENTION:   Find inspiration for a feature story in a documentary film.

SUCCESS CRITERIA:

1. Create and select from a list of themes you identify
2. Use attitude and graduation to purposefully describe a scene that reflects your selected issue - collaborative.

Find out a little about Ai Wei Wei - his art, his politics. What issues do you expect to be presented in this documentary film?

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.

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:

1. identify strengths and weaknesses of an argument.
2. articulate how intertexual references and attitudinal language can add another layer to your feature article.

This is an area you struggled with last year. Work through the argument activities with your teacher, then complete the mini project.

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

Note the words and phrases infused with attitude here.

Alter the evaluative language to change the attitude of this paragraph.

FOCUS - REBUTTING

You teacher will help explain this to you.

Complete this task together in your books.

CONCLUDING YOUR FEATURE ARTICLE

Your teacher can explain this to you.

Do this in your table group.

Many of you found this part difficult last year, so please do take this opportunity to practise consientiously.