Technique Revision - Focus on Connotation

I started teaching a Preliminary Advanced English class this year and they're an absolutely fantastic bunch of students. As with all new classes, however, there needs to be some diagnostic testing (or pre-testing, if you prefer that term). Not all of this kind of 'testing' needs to be formalised and markable, oft-times it can just be something I've used to gather information that will influence the direction I take my class in over the next few weeks.

At the moment, we're looking at the Area of Study (Belonging) with a Prescribed Text (Immigrant Chronicle by Peter Skrzynecki). To get the ball rolling I decided to go over a big list of techniques and ascertain which ones the students were familiar with. So I put the list up on the board, like so:

Then an idea hit me. I told each student to rank each term out of 3 to show how well they knew them, with a score of '1' indicating that it was a term they didn't know at all. Then I ran around the class collecting all the 1s onto my own copy of the sheet, resulting in this:

The hand-scribbled term on the bottom right is 'enjambment', which I added after we had covered it in the poem St. Patrick's College.

Now I know which techniques we should be revising. I've been working through these over the last few days; just with a few asides where I put up some quotes on the board with the title of the technique and then asked the students to try and work out what the technique was. Here's an example that went quite well, where we discussed 'Connotation' and what it meant:

I forgot to take a photo before I started drawing all over it and editing bits of it. Sorry.

I started with two sentences:

• "Corporal Jones squeezed the trigger and removed the enemy"
• "Corporal Jones squeezed the trigger and murdered the enemy"

Then asked the question, what does connotation mean in relation to these sentences? The students started offering answers, most of them quite pertinent. We talked about the associations we made with the two different words:

• Removed = Good guy, tactical, in war.
• Murdered = Harsher, modal (emotional reaction)

And then, as a class, we came up with our own definition for Connotation: "The associations a reader makes with certain words".

After this, it was time to link it to our Prescribed Text, so I trotted out the poem Feliks Skrzynecki and eagled in on the word 'father'. What are the connotations of this term? What if it were a different term that essentially meant the same thing?

I put up these words:

• Father:
• Dad:
• Patriarch:
• Daddy:
• Guardian:

And asked students to fill in their own word associations, with some interesting results:

As these are senior students, I decided not to censor their association of the word 'Daddy' with 'sexual' and 'fetish'. Their minds went there and this is meant to be about word-association. It is what it is; that's the whole point of connotation. Plus there's far 'worse' in some of the HSC Prescribed Texts.

After we had finished brainstorming each of the terms, we established that 'Father' had a more formal connotation that set up a distance between the poet and Feliks.

Buoyed by how successful this quick exercise was, I decided to plough on a little further with the quote "They dug cancer out of his foot".

This went well too, with connections made between 'dug' with visceral language and gardening. Meanwhile, 'took' implied something far less painful than, say, 'scraped'.

Here's the technique sheet below if you'd like an electronic copy:
Techniques List