Week 4 Discussion
In our groups this week we discussed activity 2 (Wynch 2010 - p. 269). As a group we decided that the text was a recount due to:
- Recollection of events and the sequence in which they occurred
- People involved were listed
- Personal comments and feelings (e.g. enjoyable, terrific)
We also discussed the following about the author:
- The vocabulary was not good - was lots of repetition of words
- There was no punctuation
- Use of different tenses
- Misspelling of words
- Speech
The group decided that the words and phrases that carried emotion were:
- Oh terrific
- Good fun
- Very funny
- Circus was good, mummy said it was
The discussion then moved onto the articles we had collected. Our three text types were:
- A recount
- An information report
- A procedure
Recount:
- Had a descriptive title
- Sequence of events
- Personal experience
- Feelings
- Commentary
Information Report:
- General statement about what it was about
- Information
- Set out formally
Procedure:
- Set format
- Instructional
- Generalised participants
- Precise information
- A goal/end product
The negatives about exploring texts are:
- That there is many types and could be confusing - as educators we would need to teach them one at a time.
- Teach them separately - make them easy to understand.
- Differentiation of student ability and grasp of language and concepts.
- Skill sets of students.
Why is it important to teach different text types:
- Different text tyepes express different things
- Provide different information
- Fit different purposes
2 comments:
Yes - good point about teaching genres one at a time, and depending on the year level you might spend a term (or more) on one genre. The most important thing though is to make sure you teach them in context as much as possible - if the students need to write for a specific purpose and audience it's much more powerful learning for them. It's the social purpose for writing (or producing a text) that is the critical thing.
This week made me think about how I would grade a student who grasped what a recount is but who had trouble with punctuation, included a variety of tenses and misspelled words. After our discussion I came to realise that it wouldn't be fair to quickly judge their work based on punctuation and misspelled words but instead praise the child for understanding that a recount has a sequence of events, personal experience and feelings.
I also believe that it is important for students to be taught one genre at a time. This will provide students with a much clearer idea about what separates the genres as well as how the different genres are used to express different things.
Post a Comment