Craft of Writing: Motif, Intertextuality, and Synaesthesia

Hi there! Below you will find three Craft of Writing mini-lessons that support students in practising their writing craft all year-round. You can find a range of other Craft of Writing resources here. The mini-lesson approach involves examining a writing technique in a ten minute segment at the start of each lesson - students are shown how to use the technique, alongside contextual examples, and then asked to put it into practice.

Motif

What is it: An image, sound, action, idea, phrase, word or anything else that repeatedly occurs throughout a text. This is used as a form of symbolism suggestive of a theme or message that the author wants to convey. (See also: symbolism, generic conventions)

Examples:

• The appearance of straight lines and harsh geometric shapes whenever the rabbit characters are seen in the picture book The Rabbits, which is suggestive of their association with artificial human-made structures. (The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan)
• The repeated references to performance and terms associated with it in Prospero's speeches. (The Tempest by William Shakespeare)
• Felix's recurring use of metaphorical language associated with magic. (Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood)

Why use it:

• Reinforces the thematic core of a text and helps a writer convey their thesis.
• Creates another level of communication in the text that can allow some readers to pick up on ideas that they might normally not pick up on.
• Contributes to a sense of mood or atmosphere in the text. Can reinforce setting with motifs associated with specific generic conventions.

Quick Activity: Accepting that a book is a symbol of knowledge, write a paragraph about an intelligent character washed up on an island that uses this symbol as a motif. It can be the literal inclusion of a book, language related to books, and/or both.

Textual Allusion / Intertextuality

What is it: Intertextuality is the use of other texts to build meaning in a new text. This can include the merging of texts, the retelling of an older text, rewriting texts in a modern context, borrowing parts of texts in order to comment on genre and narrative ideas, etc. A textual allusion is just a single reference to another text within the text, usually without affecting the narrative in a significant way. Textual allusions may or may not contribution to intertextuality. (See also: analogy, adaptation, appropriation, pastiche)

Examples:

• INTERTEXTUALITY: Hag-Seed features a production of The Tempest as a way to provide parallels between the original play and its own retelling of the play. (Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood)
• TEXTUAL ALLUSION: 8Handz plays the song Ride the Lightning by Metallica while Sal and Tony are locked into a cell. (Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood)
• "A fever of panic against an unseen evil, as though Perth were Gotham City itself" - Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey.

Why use it:

• Adds layers of meaning to a work of fiction - the use of a familiar reference can change the reader's perspective of either the new text or the older one, or both.
• Can clarify meaning when discussing complicated ideas - provides a frame of reference for the reader to identify.

Quick Activity: Describe something by using a reference to a text you have read in English.

Synaesthesia

What is it: A figure of speech in which one of the five primary senses is used in the place of another. Usually used as part of a metaphor or simile as this allows for a sense to refer to something that is completely unrelated to it, such as describing abstract concepts using colours; or smell, taste or sound-based adjectives and verbs used in unexpected places.

Examples:

• "The smell of misery, lying over everyone within like an enchantment" - Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
• "The words cut the air like a dagger" - The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• "Taste the rainbow" - Skittles advertisement

Why use it:

• Demonstrates creativity when communicating ideas and adds layers of meaning to a text.
• Can reinforce a motif through describing a variety of things using vocabulary related to one particular sense.
• Some authors can use it to create humour by surprising and deliberately confusing the reader.

Quick Activity: Use a taste to describe something unrelated to taste. Use a sound to describe something unrelated to sound. Use a colour to describe something that cannot be seen. 

Here are the three writing elements all in one sheet for ease of use:

• Writology Issue 9

Happy writing!

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

Socratic Circles in the Classroom

Socratic Circle configuration

Back in 2009, when Susan Boyle had the biggest selling album in the world and Australia was 4 Prime Ministers younger, I was undertaking my Master of Teaching and learning about all the ways I could engage students in their learning. A lot of this stuff was particular to my English method but one thing that transcended the subject area was Socratic Seminars.

The Socratic Seminar is a social method of teaching in which discussion and listening are used to prompt students in their critical engagement with a text or issue. Back at university I didn't really want to sit in on this activity and argue with a bunch of strangers, but it actually turned out to be a really useful way to articulate ideas and had just the right amount of structure to keep things civilised and relevant.

I filed this lesson away and didn't really think about it for a few years. I learned how to teach and had a great journey in discovering my vocation as an educator (that's a whole other story) but during those beginning years I always remembered the circles used in the Socratic Seminar. I remembered how different it was to structure a discussion in this way, but I wasn't game to try it in a classroom. As any teacher knows, those first few years of teaching are mostly about behaviour management. I tried plenty of new ideas (technically, everything was new to me at that point) but I held off on some of the more experimental things whilst I built up my organisation and administration skills.

Fast-forward to 2015, and by this point I'm making it a thing to always try something completely new with each class every term. For my Year 10 English class in Term 2 I decided it was time to introduce the Socratic Circles. I will note at this point that my current Year 10 class is impeccably behaved (thus why I was game to give the circles a try with this particular class).

I picked last period on a Thursday, when I knew the kids would be tired and not all that enthused about writing, and had them walk into a reconfigured room where all the chairs were arranged into two concentric circles. Here's how the lesson ran:

1. Half of the class are instructed to sit in the middle circle, whilst the other half sit in the outer circle.

2. I introduce a question, in this case it was: To what extent was Lady Macbeth to blame for the events in Shakespeare's Macbeth?

3. The inner circle are told to give each other their views. The outer circle's job is to listen only; they are forbidden to speak or interact.

4. After some time has passed, the circles are swapped and the discussion is allowed to continue. Only the inner circle may speak.

5. This process is repeated as many times as the arguments allow for, and new questions can be introduced by the teacher at any point.

The teacher's job is to moderate the circles and judge when a question has run out of steam. I was lucky with the Macbeth question because my students really ran with it and spent a whole 40 minutes passionately arguing about it. It helped that the question itself is something that scholars have argued over for hundreds of years, and the newness of the activity probably had something to do with the enthusiasm of the students but, suffice to say, it was a hit with my kids.

Since then, I've had Socratic Circle lessons with this class about twice a term. I think it works really well for a number of reason:

• Not all students do their best work in the form of writing. By giving students the opportunity to demonstrate their learning in alternative ways, it empowers those with speaking skills.
• Also, as any English teacher knows, the mode of Listening is one of the key areas that we have to assess on from Grades 7-12. Aside from asking students to answer comprehension questions about audio texts, or having students interview each other, there are precious few other ways to involve listening as a primary skill in an activity without it feeling tokenistic. The role of the outer circle in Socratic Seminars is therefore quite a useful way for students to practice the skill of gathering information through active listening.
• Even the best students get tired of reading or writing all the time. The use of a Socratic Seminar as a way to build critical engagement is often something that many students will gladly get on board on with.
• Probably most important of all is the fact that all students need to speak in this activity. I've observed many of my shyest students passionately defend a viewpoint in the inner circle, feeling more comfortable about speaking in this half-class environment than a regular whole class setup. 
• I think it also helps if the teacher is not involved in the discussion beyond the odd interjected question, as it forces the students to take control and move their own thoughts to centrestage.

During Term 3, I used the Socratic Seminar to have Year 10 grapple with several questions related to the text Jasper Jones, especially in regards to the roles of sport and intellectualism in Australian culture. Some of the ideas the students discussed were incredibly sophisticated and insightful, and I have no doubt in my mind that this assisted them with their essay responses later in the term.

More recently I also opened the circles up to a range of current affairs to help broaden the argumentation and elaboration skills of the students. Some of the questions I threw into the circle were:

- Is Australia's policy to 'stop the boats' fair?

- What makes someone Australian?

- Has technology changed society for better or worse?

- Why are movies better than books?

And here are some choice snippets I quickly jotted down from the discussions that ensued.

"Don't you think that everyone in the world should get access to better health before we get a new iPhone?" - Rory

"Movies aren't better than books because they're a group activity; you don't get to have your imagination of what is happening" - Elleece

"We're the last generation of sanity" - Mel (on iPhones becoming too invasive)

"Using computers to research things dumbs down our ability to use books for the same purpose" - Kodee

"You don't have a certificate to say you're human or a person, so why should you have one to say you're Australian?" - Elleece

Next year, if I get the chance to continue using the circles, I plan to have the outer circle start making notes to help them focus on the inner circle's discussion a bit more. This can hopefully be built into lessons as a way to generate ideas and continue fostering a healthy atmosphere of open discussion that's focused on curriculum.

How to Help Students Achieve in Assessment Tasks

Today and yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the 2015 Assessment in Schools Conference at UNSW Global in Sydney. One of the key sessions that had an impact on me was Professor Andrew Martin's work on Personal Proficiency and how we can 'optimise' the academic potential of students.

Within the first five minutes of Professor Martin's seminar I felt like a great cloud in my head had been dispersed. Since becoming a teacher I've becoming very familiar with the word 'resilience'. Not in the sense that I'm expert on it, simply in the sense that I hear about it nearly every day.

"Davey McHuddlestein is a really resilient student"

"That Rita Wong has no resilience"

"I wish I was a bit more resilient whenever I hear the music of Nickleback"

It got to the point where I was hearing the word so much that it had lost all meaning. During a recent Year 10 unit on Jasper Jones we did some work around the idea of resilience but, I must admit, I let the students lead on this theme because I didn't have much to say about it. 

Professor Martin's work around optimising potential involved a framework on the personal proficiency of students that struck a beam of clarity into my overcast brain. Resilience wasn't quite what I thought it was.

He asserts, as a research psychologist and educator, that there are three major variable traits within students that regulate the way they react to external factors. By extension, this no doubt applies to non-students too. They are:

1. Buoyancy

2. Resilience

3. Adaptability

Martin states that buoyancy (or academic buoyancy) is a student's ability to deal with every day adversity - the deadlines, the poor marks, the criticism, a fight with friends or at home, etc. This is interesting because these are sorts of things often heard bandied about in connection to the 'R' word. 

Resilience on the other hand, as Martin says, "was born on the street, in poverty". This is a person's ability to deal with chronic or acute adversity... things like poverty, disability, suspensions, chronic under-achievement, poor mental health, learning, repeating a grade, etc. Heavy stuff. Martin is very emphatic in separating resilience from buoyancy. Resilience is not a student's ability to deal with every day adversity.

The third of these factors, adaptability, is someone's ability to deal with change and disruptions to routine. Things that aren't really forms of adversity but can still throw a spanner in the metaphorical works.  Some people can deal with change well, some can't.

These traits are only the smallest fraction of what Professor Martin spoke about today - he also talked in detail about adopting a multi-dimensional approach to boosting academic growth, and the various factors that impede student motivation. 

One more thing that I will mention, however, is the Five Cs of Academic Buoyancy, which Martin listed as observed elements for good academic buoyancy. These are, in no particular order:

Confidence

Coordinartion

Commitment

Composure

Control

If students can maintain these then they should have no problem 'bouncing back' from every day adversity (which is the majority of what they'll actually face in a regular school environment, as opposed to chronic or acute adversity). For non-teachers reading this, all of this stuff is just as relevant for our own lives if we want to find any kind of success. 

It makes perfect sense to me in hindsight. I guess this is the epitome of one of those moments where a light switches on in your head, where a great educator like Professor Andrew Martin illuminates something for you.   

Click here for more information about Professor Martin and his research.

As Thick as a Brick

I was talking with my Year 10 English class today about motifs. We're studying the wonderful Australian novel Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey, and there are number of motifs woven into the narrative. The most notable of these is probably recurring language that revolves around water metaphors, reminding the reader of a certain traumatic event that occurs in Chapter 1 and the way this event is always at the forefront of the narrator's mind.

But I digress.

There's also a lot of talk in the text about a 'brick' that sits in the protagonist's stomach. As I discussed it with my class it incidentally set me to thinking about bricks... actual bricks, not metaphorical ones. I've got a brick story.

When I was 11 years old I was placed into a class alongside students in the next grade up. There were about five of us from Year 5 put in with the Year 6s, and at the time I had no idea why I was there or why they'd even mixed the grades.

My teacher was named Mr Woodcock and, even at the age of 11, I could sense that he didn't really like me. The only other thing I remember about him is that he had a black beard and rheumy eyes. That, and this one time when I brought a brick to school.

It's hard to imagine your childhood self through the eyes of the adults of that time, but I could imagine that I must have been irritating to some of them. I collected stamps, and coins, and a series of illustrated bird cards released by a brand of tea called Kinkara. Once, when another teacher, Mr. Allison, told the class that he was 29 years old, I expressed amazement that he had so little hair. The look he gave in reply made me feel about 2 centimetres tall. I guess some would call this precociousness. It's a trait that I'm much more familiar with now that I'm on the other side of the equation, dealing with chirpy Year 7 students who will happily tell me that my own hair is significantly diminished. Ironic, right?

Anyway, back in Year 5, Mr. Woodcock gave an assignment to make a brick. The brick could be made using any number of methods, and it had to weigh as close to a kilogram as possible. I went home and told Mum, and she let me empty out a tub of Flora margarine. I filled it with mud and sticks, and I let it set in the sun before popping it in the freezer for extra hardness. When I was happy and satisfied enough with the result I stuffed it into my school bag and took it in to class.

No one else had their bricks.

I was a little confused. I triumphantly showed my lumpy margarine-shaped brick to the other kids in the playground before school, but they didn't have theirs. They didn't even know about the assignment, and laughed at me when I tried to explain it. Obviously there had been no such assignment. Mr. Woodcock had just told me to do it because I must have been annoying him too much, and he wanted to see if I would actually go home and make a brick. There was no mark, no feedback for my method of brick-construction. I was just left with this odd weight in my bag.

Suffice to say, I tested the strength of my product later that day during lunch time. I proceeded to drop it from a variety of heights until it broke apart into a series of chalky orange fragments held together by a web of thick grass and gum tree twigs.

And that's my brick story.