Introducing Year 7 to the Concept of Literature

While teaching, I find myself coming back to English over and over again and thinking about what the discipline is and why we teach it. Looking at the NSW syllabus document and examining the content points becomes useful because I can use it to reframe how I approach things. It gives me ideas about other 'ways into' the subject. If I get stuck while programming a unit of work I'll keep bouncing back to the outcomes and looking at the content points, which contain loads of ideas embedded in them. This also seems to be one of the most effective pieces of advice to give pre-service and beginner English teachers who find themselves stuck for ideas when lesson planning. 

On top of this, we also have the English Textual Concepts, which act as a synthesis of the major ideas and methods that have come to exemplify English. These can be incredibly useful when designing an overall unit of work but also have merit when looking at singular lesson activities.

When moving from Primary to Secondary school, students will need to be introduced to English in a new way - a more developed way that will hopefully sustain their growth as critical thinkers and challenge them by placing them in that 'zone of proximal development'. I've been thinking about this and how it can be scaffolded for students with varying degrees of literacy and other additional learning needs. How, for example, can the concept of Literary Value be introduced to Year 7, assuming that this terminology has not yet been mentioned to them in a Stage 3 context?

I think the first step is to break down what 'Literary Value' means in wording that the average Year 7 student will understand. Part of this is reframing the concept in a way that has authentic meaning in a wider context, so I'll swap out 'Literary Value' here for 'Literature'. When I used to work in a bookstore, the term 'Literature' was recognisable as a term with its own connotations separate from 'General Fiction' - a distinction that also extends into the realms of literary criticism, publishing, marketing, and popular review categories in newspapers, magazines, websites, etc. Using this idea along with the English Textual Concepts descriptor for Stage 4-level Literary Value, we can arrive at a workable definition that looks like this:

Literature: Fictional written works, especially those considered to be of superior or lasting artistic merit.

Activity 1: The first step is to place this definition in the centre of a board. Rather than do a mindmap or brainstorm, the teacher should lead a discussion on what each constituent part of the definition means and annotate it. Students should copy the definition into their book first and then add the annotations as you go. This serves a dual purpose - it scaffolds and models the process of determining meaning, and it also teaches the skill of annotating which will become more useful to students as they get older and begin to interact with more demanding texts.

The parts you will need to discuss with students and annotate are as follows:

• What does 'fictional' mean?
• What does 'superior' mean? Who decides what is superior?
• What does 'artistic merit' mean?
• What does 'lasting' mean?
• Note also that 'especially' leaves the process open-ended - what one person determines to be 'literature' may be subjective.

Activity 2: Students can then be given a worksheet with six examples of written works, ones that they will hopefully recognise or for which they will at least understand the context. The worksheet scaffolds the process of determining what 'counts' as literature. You may need to read aloud some of the fine print on the book examples as they probably won't be large enough on a printout for students to see. You should also project it on the board so they can see it in colour (assuming your photocopy of the worksheet is in black and white). 

Focus the conversations around things like:

• The age of the book (IE. Is the book 'lasting' in that we still know about it after all this time?)
• Prizes the book has won ('Pulitzer Prize', 'Australian Children's Book of the Year')
• Is the book fiction or non-fiction?
• The last example, Wonder, will be interesting because a lot of students read it in Primary school. In their eyes, this will make it a 'classic' of sorts. This could lead to interesting discussions on whether it may one day be considered a classic in the future and therefore have lasting artistic merit. 

Activity 3: As always, try to get your students writing independently for a bit. Tell them to pick one literary text from the worksheet and write a few sentences explaining why they think it continues to have impact after such a long time (or will continue having impact into the future). 

You can find the worksheet here - Literature. 

English Textual Concepts: Point of View

In my teaching adventures last year I had the privilege to teach a Year 8 class with additional learning needs and I can say (and have probably already said on this blog before) that it was one of the most rewarding teaching/learning experiences I've had so far in my career. Teaching such a diverse range of little people helped me re-frame a lot of teaching strategies in a way that would make them more accessible and inclusive for those with learning difficulties. At this point I had already been experimenting with integrating the English Textual Concepts into my programming for a few years and the resources below represent one of these forays in relation to the aforementioned Year 8 class. 

For some additional context: the English Textual Concepts have been in development for quite some time. When I first heard about them at the 2014 ETA Conference they were referred to as the 'English Concept Continuum' and after this it popped up in various English-related professional learning scenarios and I kind of made it my mission to attend as much of PD sessions as possible. These days it is now being taught at Western Sydney University and is endorsed by the Department of Education as an invaluable resource for English programming - it isn't a mandatory part of being an English teacher but it's certainly a helpful one! When I get stuck in the formative stages of programming I find it's useful to have a squizz at the Textual Concepts and locate a concept that might work as a way to pull everything together.

So, anyway, I wanted to teach Point of View to my Year 8 class because I'd noted some of the students struggling to comprehend how writers establish a relationship between narrator and audience. Here's what the framework says in regards to teaching this particular concept to Stage 4:

Point of View - Stage 4

Students understand that choice of point of view shapes the meanings, the values and the effect of the text.

Students learn that

• a narrator can tell a story, comment on a story or break out from the story to address the responder, directly
• point of view is a device for persuading 
• point of view directs the responder to the values in the text

The Qinling Panda, with its brown fur, is one of the most endangered mammals in the world

Animal Conservation

At the start of 2017 the unit my school was teaching Year 8 focused on endangered animals and text types, which works well with Point of View if you want to look at how different text types utilise first, second and third person for particular effect. Anyway, here's a breakdown of the lesson:

1. Start the PowerPoint Presentation on Point of View. On the second slide brainstorm with students the language used for first, second and third person (IE. 'I, 'Me', 'Myself' for first person; 'You', 'Your', 'You're' for second person; 'He', 'She', Proper Nouns', 'His, etc. for third person). This explicitly identifies and classifies the sort of language the students will be looking for in the next part of the lesson.
2. Students are then shown three pieces of writing about the American Bison in the PowerPoint Presentation; hand out these extracts as a separate sheet and have them highlight the language that differentiates the pieces as first, second and third person.
3. On the 6th slide students are asked to consider the implications of how point of view affects the relationship between writer and responder. Think about: the first person text could be either non-fiction or fiction, however, the third person feels more resolutely like fiction and the second person example moves into a different realm altogether (it can be seen as an instructional text of some kind, perhaps even a travel guide). The questions build upwards ala Bloom's Taxonomy, starting with the 'what' questions before asking students to engage with some basic evaluation (which version appeals the most and why?)
4. The last slide gives students a first person piece of writing that they must rewrite as third person. It's a fairly straightforward activity that allows a struggling class a reasonable degree of success. The scaffolding of analysis before this final activity should also prepare students to discuss their piece of writing afterwards in relation to the way shifting point of view can help the responder to see the content of the text in new ways.

Sometimes I think we (the teacher) underestimate the value of explicitly teaching what we might take as obvious - there are some students who come to high school with a very real need for continued support in developing key comprehension skills that some students can already access unconsciously. In any event, it certainly doesn't hurt to let students achieve success in regards to exploring Point of View before moving forward to more advanced English processes.

Narrative Voice and Jasper Jones

Most of my Year 10 class from 2015 loved Jasper Jones, and were excited when the film recently came out.

I've mentioned it before but it never hurts to mention it again: if you live in the Sydney area and have a chance to undertake Jo Rossbridge and Kathy Rushton's Conversations About Texts modules then you really, really should. I got so much out of this course in regards to teaching and grammar that I have considered doing the whole thing a second time just so I can keep learning about it. 

I was lucky in that I had the opportunity to do this course around the same time that the English Textual Concepts framework first started becoming available. At the time I was teaching Jasper Jones to my Year 10 class - a wonderful Year 10 class who were open to a range of ideas and modes of learning - and I was fortunate in that all these things came together to allow for a marriage of grammar analysis and the English Textual Concept of Narrative Voice. 

At this point in time I will not say that my marriage of these is completely harmonious, however, what the analysis of grammar has enabled is a greater variety of students engaging with analysis of writing style. As English teachers we often teach the subject in a fluid and holistic way that will appeal to those who are 'English-minded'. However, by incorporating more rigid modes of analysis in support to this approach we can also engage students with diverse learning styles - IE. Those who are not 'English-minded'. This means using analytical criteria where possible, calculating lexical density, utilising a range of numeracy-based approaches, and looking at grammatical intricacy - methods that can assist the more naturally mathematically or scientifically-minded in finding access points to English. 

Most of the resources below cover things like tense and perspective. Nonetheless, there are also questions about the aforementioned lexical density and grammatical intricacy - skills that my students had been taught just prior to analysing these texts. The Conversations About Texts course covers lexical analysis in great detail.

Highly recommended!

Here is a brief rundown of how it works:

Lexical Density

This refers to the amount of lexical items in a piece of writing. For the sake of not confusing the students too much, it's best to get them to think of lexical items as any word or phrase that has a single meaning. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs... these are lexical items. The other non-lexical words in the piece of writing will be prepositions, connectives, etc. The easiest way to get students to tell the difference is by getting them to ask the question: could I explain the meaning of this word? If they can't, then it's not a lexical item. 

Lexical density is calculated as a percentage. Students underline all the lexical items and count them,  and this number is then divided by the total number of words in the text to arrive at said percentage.

EG. 70 lexical items divided by 110 words = 64% lexical density.

I tell students that a good piece of writing should have a relatively high lexical density (of course, this isn't exclusively the only thing that makes a good piece of writing - make sure you tell them that too!) The lexical density shouldn't be too high though - too high and it becomes incredibly jargonistic and hard to follow. Hopefully your best writers will fall between 60% and 80%.

I regularly get students to test the lexical density of their own paragraphs. It's a nice, concrete way for students to measure their progress if they're aiming to increase their use of extended vocabulary. A variation of the calculation to this end could be that they are only allowed to count each lexical item once. So if they write 'increasingly' then they can't count it again if they've used it later in the same paragraph. Also, for the calculation to work the paragraph needs to be more than just two or three sentences.

Grammatical Intricacy

This will require students to have an understanding of clauses, something that they may or may not remember from their literacy-intensive days of primary school. Students count the number of clauses in the paragraph and then divide these by sentences to work out the average amount of clauses per sentence in the piece of writing.

EG. 10 clauses divided by 4 sentences = 2.5.

The higher the resulting number the more grammatically intricate the sentences are. Ensure that the students don't equate this with any kind of judgment on the text - single clause sentences can be just as effective as complex sentences with multiple clauses. The point is that students have solid evidence to support judgements about the piece as a whole, especially if they are looking at the way sentence structure can be a reflection of style and genre.

The Drowned World was Ballard's second novel, a memorably dystopian vision of tropical London after the ice caps have melted.

Narrative Voice

This brings us to the lesson. In studying Jasper Jones with Year 10 I wanted to engage the students with the narrative voice that Craig Silvey employed in writing his novel. This, firstly, requires for students to have an overview of the choices that authors make when creating a narrative voice.

1. This PPT breaks narrative voice down into three key starting points - tense, perspective, and language. Work through the PowerPoint by talking students through the activities and their understanding of them. You will need to help them unpack the difference between 'limited' and 'omniscient' when discussing Third Person. (If you want to extend students who are really interested in this stuff you could probably mention that there are, in reality, 12 different kinds of tense, and at least 6 different perspectives. Save this for the go-getters though, it will just confuse the majority!)
2. Students then engage with a text extract from The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard. This text has little to no connection to Jasper Jones, which makes it a perfect comparative point in terms of looking at the breadth of narrative voice. The extract is a small piece that introduces the setting for Ballard's post-apocalyptic novel. I ask students to work in pairs on this so they can evaluate and make educated guesses at what genre it might be (they aren't made aware that it's a post-apocalyptic novel). The information they collect using the accompanying questions should assist them in helping build a picture of how the choice of narrative voice supports the kind of text Ballard has constructed.
3. Then, to bring it full circle, students undertake a similar activity in analysing an extract from Jasper Jones. Of particular use is the final question in which they are ask to draw comparisons between Silvey's novel and The Drowned World, based on their understanding of narrative voice.

Resources
Resource 1 - Narrative Voice
Resource 2 - Extract 1: The Drowned World
Resource 3 - Extract 2: Jasper Jones

English Textual Concepts - the Processes

About a month ago I had the opportunity to undertake some professional learning after school. One was an Adobe Connect session (which are a fantastically efficient and user-friendly way to conference - and FREE!), and the other was a Primary Executive Support Group seminar (only $40 and not too far from where I live - money well spent). Both, by serendipitous coincidence, focused on the English Textual Concepts - the rollout and implementation of which continues with much excitement and energy across Australia.

I've spoken about the Concepts on this blog before; in particular the way this framework re-positions the English syllabus through a lens that assists in applying a consistent focus and agreed-upon metalanguage to the way we (English teachers) approach our subject area. All English teachers have an idea of what characterisation and narrative are, however, do they have the same idea of what they are and where students should be in their own understanding of these things? How do we approach a level of consistency and standardisation that lends our KLA increased credence and authority?

We can agree that English is about the study of texts and textuality, and that texts represent power relationships and culture, but the English Textual Concepts allows this to be extended further into a definitive paradigm. 

I think I've attended six separate sessions explaining the Textual Concepts now and I've mostly spent this time thinking about the Concepts part of the framework - the things like Argument, Code and Convention, Figuration, etc. This time though I found myself thinking more about the Processes half of the framework. 

My colleague and friend Kira Bryant pointed out to me that the Processes are the framework's equivalent of the syllabus modes (the way we assess English - Listening, Speaking, Writing, Reading, Viewing, Representing), and it got me thinking about how the Processes could be used in a similar way. 

Processes

• Experimenting - Creative or Imaginative Writing, and Representation
• Engaging Personally - Enjoyment or Value or Personal Response
• Engaging Critically - Analysing Techniques and Structure
• Connecting - Exploring Context, and Intertextuality
• Understanding - Identifying and developing Understanding of Themes and Ideas
• Reflecting  - Metacognition and recognition of Learning Processes

Imagine dividing our assessment of English into these processes. There's a certain authenticity in modelling assessment on the ways we want students to think. We teach this stuff anyway, and the English Textual Concepts framework points us in the direction of teaching this stuff more explicitly. 

And hey, this interpretation has only just come to me while listening to the aforementioned seminar, so I may soon reformulate my ideas of how to use the Processes to assess. Heck, I know I will. But, to paraphrase the entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, if you're not embarrassed by the first version of something - then you've launched too late.

I might not be an ambitious capitalist techno-wunderkind like Hoffman (incidentally, he created LinkedIn, which was recently purchased by Microsoft) but I do believe this philosophy is applicable to teaching, writing, and most other things.

In other words, if you wait until something is perfect before you've revealed it to anyone, then you're probably waiting well past its due date in terms of relevance. In addition, it feels naive to think that anything can be perfected to this extent - we need to test ideas out in the real world to see if they stand up outside of the vacuum of our minds; if they can grow through the magic of dialectical exchange, or if they wither under the scrutiny of our peers.

Besides, history has shown us time and again that ideas are never 'finished'. There's always going to be something new to add. That's the nature of culture. 

English Textual Concepts Framework - What Is It?

With English, we can analyse EVERYTHING! Look at this great advertisement.

I will just say this first, up front - I love the English Textual Concepts. I want to turn them into a blanket and wrap myself up in them, or throw it all into a smoothie that I can drink every morning. The English Textual Concepts framework makes English into a clearer subject in terms of teaching and learning, crystallising a seemingly infinite subject area into 15 broad but separate concepts and 6 concurrent process. 

English can be a 'slippery' subject (Eva Gold's words, not mine!) so a solid framework on which we can hang the subject is manna from heaven for English teachers. That aforementioned slipperiness is reflected in everything from the blank look on a student's face when expected to respond to a question about their favourite TV show, to the discipline's extensive use of impenetrable holistic criteria to assess student work. It's in that moment when a kid finally cracks, and exasperatedly exclaims, "I hate English, sir, I don't get it!" or another student remarks, "What do we even need this for?" (that old chestnut!) 

I used to struggle with explaining to laymen what English was even about. It's tempting to sometimes say 'books' or 'reading and writing' because that's what most people see it as, but as any English teacher (sadly?) knows, books are a very small aspect of the subject. And in contrast, reading and writing is every teacher's job - literacy is a concern for all subject areas, not just English. With more experience under my belt, I now quickly tell students and parents, "English is about thinking". 

But whilst that is true, it's still a bit nebulous - slippery - for some folks to get their heads around. So that's where this English Textual Concepts framework comes in, transforming a difficult key learning learning area into something much more solid for everyone to get their heads around.

The framework is (in its most general terms) arranged into these domains:

Concepts

• Argument
• Author / Authority
• Character
• Code and Convention
• Context
• Figurative Language
• Genre
• Intertextuality
• Literary Value
• Narrative
• Representation
• Perspective
• Point of View
• Style
• Theme

Processes

• Engaging personally
• Engaging critically
• Understanding
• Connecting
• Experimenting
• Reflecting 

The concepts lend themselves to choice - as the teacher, you can look at a text and figure out which 2 to 4 concepts you'd like to concentrate on. The processes then sit alongside these - they're the skills that need to be taught in order for students to come to grips with the concepts. You could perhaps think of it in terms of the syllabus outcomes, with the concepts as your learn about outcomes and the processes as your learn to outcomes. But maybe that's oversimplifying a paradigm that has been constructed on its own terms as an entirely separate but complimentary framework. I guess there's a whole other blog in that discussion!

Here's a brief example of how the concepts can be used, with the poem She by Pedro Xisto:

That's the poem above. Neat, huh?

Anyway, today I attended some Professional Learning on the English Textual Concepts and this concrete poem by Pedro Xisto was used as an example by Ann Small of a potential text for Year 9 poetry. It's a poem that works quite well with looking at the concept of Code and Convention.

"Codes and conventions are prisms through which we interpret the world and ascertain our place in it". Well, yes, of course - but getting more specific, Code and Convention is about structure. At a Kindergarten level you start out looking at morphemes and letters, then as the students develop through primary school to secondary they look at:

• Verbal, visual and digital signs.
• Sentences and pictures
• Paragraphs, conversations, films, novels, genres... (whole texts, and whole meta-texts)

It's grammar. If you've been following this blog you'll know how truly fond I am of grammar. I feel very pleased that the concept of Code and Convention allows us to focus on this in an English context. 

 

Looking at this odd three-letter poem, we can address it in terms of Code and Convention quite easily. What interpretations can students come up with while looking at this poem? What do the letters represent? What conventions of layout are used and how does this influence meaning? Is there repetition of a letter? Is contrast used? What about the relative size of letters? Where are they placed?

In other words:

- At the letter level, what is being said? 

- As a picture, what does it represent?

- As a text, what is the message, and how do you interpret what the composer is saying?

I had never seen this poem before today but I can tell you now, I think it would be really fun to do with a class. Firstly, as analysis using the concept of Code and Convention, and then, secondly (as suggested by presenter Ann Small), a creative activity where students come up with their own concrete poem in the same style - followed by a written explanation of what they're trying to say in their poem.

It's fabulous.