Creative Writing: Reinforcing an Idea

One of the challenges of teaching Year 7 is that we often have to determine the level of understanding that a class is at. We may often find that this varies wildly from year to year. Students in metropolitan secondary schools are often drawn from a range of primary schools, and this variation in context can lead to ever-shifting permutations of Year 7 classes where students sitting alongside each other have come from different primary schools where curriculum has been interpreted and delivered in many different ways. 

In short, we can't really assume too much. 

Instead, we utilise assessment for learning - informal evaluation of student ability gathered through activities that act as a litmus test of classroom efficacy. We watch how students react and work with certain activities to gauge their ability level. We check for understanding. And then, after this, we engage to some extent in a process of universal design - re-adjusting how we pitch the lesson so that all students can access it in some way. 

Sometimes, or oftentimes, the general ability level of a mixed ability Year 7 class requires us to start from scratch so we can better understand what's happening inside the learning of our students. The activity in this blog is borne from such a context. It speaks to the idea that one needs to go back to basics to ensure that an intellectually-diverse collective of students are brought onto the same page. Even high-performing students with gifts for critical thinking will benefit from having things broken down to their components as this allows for new approaches that they may not have considered, or explains things they may have subconsciously wondered about. In the task below we are looking at one aspect of imaginative writing. With Year 7, or any mixed-ability class, I often find that it's much more effective to only focus on one skill or idea at a time.

In this case I'm aiming to teach the use of increased vocabulary to reinforce a theme or idea. This means that I won't get bogged down in spelling, or grammar, or sentence structure, or punctuation, or any number of other things. I want to look at this skill in a vacuum. I want to quarantine it off so I can examine it in on a plate of glass in the cold unyielding light of a microscope. And so students, who are looking at this microscope slide alongside me, can better understand how to "show their working" (to borrow a phrase from Maths). The time for synthesising a range of disparate skills is a whole other lesson - we simply just can't teach everything at once all the time; it's overwhelming for both the teacher and the student. 

Here is a PowerPoint that breaks down this skill through the use of a modelled paragraph - Make Your Idea Stick.

1. The goal is to get students to come up with an idea or theme and to then explore and reinforce this using a variety of words.
2. First, we model this with an excerpt from an age-appropriate novel. In this case, I've used Victor Kelleher's Taronga. The idea is that he wants to show his audience a version of the future where society has broken down and everything we know has been destroyed.
3. Give the students a copy of the paragraph from the PPT.
4. Students highlight any words that show that things have broken down, gone wrong, or been destroyed. Direct students to look for nouns, adjectives, verbs that demonstrate this. This will create a visual guide to a subject-specific set of vocabulary within the paragraph.
5. After students have had a chance to find their words, work together as a class to construct a highlighted version on the board with the 3rd slide of the PPT. The 4th slide of the PPT then has a completed one for the class to compare their collaborative version to.
6. Students then draw arrows from each word to the next, creating a text chain that ties the paragraph together and again visually demonstrates how subject-specific vocabulary has conveyed Kelleher's idea. 
7. The final step is for students to then write their own paragraph. If they're stuck for an idea it will up to the teacher to pick one for them, something different to the Kelleher model. It could be something like: a character is amazed by something they've seen or a character feels a sense of immense dread related to their surroundings or depict a world where modern technology was never invented. The possibilities are endless.

I'm a big fan of teaching students these text chains. The real name of this grammatical element of writing is 'lexical chain', and it exists in texts as a reflection of said text's overall cohesion. Well-developed or expert use of lexical chains improves clarity for the reader and 'builds the field' of a topic that is being explored. Teaching this isn't restricted to just English, I've used it also with History and Aboriginal Culture classes, and have seen it used really well in Science.  

Using Text Chains

Text chains show the way that authors bring great books, like A Monster Calls (above), to life

Today I am lucky enough to be heading to a TeachMeet out at Camden Primary School. I love TeachMeets because they provide an opportunity for teachers to share ideas in a concise and useful fashion - each teacher is usually restricted to 7 minutes or so to keep things snappy. In the spirit of this snappiness I'm also going to keep this blog short. 

The content of the presentation can be found here: Using Text Chains.

I've written about text chains on this blog before, and these posts can be found by clicking the 'Text Chains' label attached to this post.

Anyway, I'd love to write more but, being Term 3 and all, I'm a bit pressed for time. Hope you find it useful nonetheless!

Macbeth and Grammar Analysis

The lightbulb moment.

It's that point where you see a student's facial expression shift as the meaning of what you're saying dawns on them. You don't always see it in every lesson, or even in every week, but when you do see it - you know it. I haven't seen half as many lightbulb moments in all my other lessons combined as I have when explicitly teaching grammar skills.   

These skills include, but aren't limited to:

• Lexical Chains (also known as 'text chains')
• Simple, Compound, and Complex Sentences
• Embedded Clauses
• Adjectival Clauses
• Ellipsis
• Lexical Density and Grammatical Intricacy 

I recently spent a lesson with my Year 10 class honing in on text chains. This was done in conjunction with teaching Shakespeare's Macbeth. The first thing I did was get the students to copy this short piece of text on some of the play's themes.

The copying is the easy part, and you can even skip this step by just handing them the text on a piece of paper. The next bit is the interesting part where they have to start engaging with some text analysis. This is done through the identification and highlighting of 'lexical chains' (also known as 'text chains'):

1. Model an example first. Highlight the name of the play, 'Macbeth', in one colour and then highlight three other words or word-groups that mean the same thing, drawing arrows to show the 'chain' that runs through the text. (The other three examples are 'the play', 'this text', and 'piece of theatre').
2. Once students have seen one of these chains, ask them to identify some of their own. Examples could include: 'Shakespeare' and associated terms, 'themes' and associated terms, and 'Macbeth' (the character) and associated terms.

The purpose of this activity is to show students the way synonyms can be used to increase the cohesion of a text. 'Cohesion' refers to the way a text hangs together, and text chains are one of several ways that increased sophistication can be achieved in writing. 

Here are the completed examples:

The point here is that students begin to get a better sense of why it's important to utilise a wider vocabulary, and they can also now see explicit lines of meaning that tie the text together. The longer a particular text chain the more the piece can be said to maintain this specific theme throughout the paragraph or essay.

Another byproduct of this process is that it assists students in decoding unfamiliar terms. The lexical chains encourage the reader to 'read' the text in a different way, building up their understanding, and gathering further literacy tools with which they can attack increasingly sophisticated pieces of writing. For those of you out there who are keen on Super Six comprehension, this comes under monitoring.

Coming to grips with text chains is the point where students have that aforementioned 'lightbulb' moment, and it primes them for further analysis of the text in other ways. It's empowering for students to now see at least one clear way that they can determine the quality of a piece of a text. I point out here that it isn't by any means the only indicator of quality, however, it is nonetheless a way in which students can assess both their own writing and the writing of others. Having gained a better understanding of how an extensive vocabulary can improve writing, students now also seem much more willing to try a few other new things. They've essentially been scaffolded to a point where they can begin an even closer reading of the text.

Here's how we can build further. Ask students to do the following:

The first question is asking students to actively decode new words by using what they've already learned. I nudge them along at this point but it's important to let them have a few educated guesses first, and for them to share their answers with one another. 

The second question is a way to make students consider the usefulness of adjectives in building deeper shades of meaning. Take an example, such as 'underlying concepts', and demonstrate the way in which 'underlying' can be removed without changing the essential meaning of the sentence. Then ask students to consider what the adjective 'underlying' adds to the word 'concepts'. This demonstrates the overall point of the adjective as a grammatical function that describes an attribute of the noun it precedes.

The third question deals with the cohesive device known as 'ellipsis'. In this context, an ellipsis is any word that is implied but not stated. The phrase 'Chief amongst these are' omits the word 'themes' between 'these' and 'are' due to the fact that the term 'themes' has already been made clear in the prior sentence. Gaining an understanding of ellipsis is dependent on context; students need to read the preceding and proceeding sentences to achieve greater awareness of the word that is subject to omission. Ellipsis exists (much like synonym use to build text chains) as another way for writers to avoid unnecessary repetition. Getting students to become consciously aware of this allows for further empowerment in their own writing.