Responding to texts

Students explore the human experience and the world through reading and examining a range of texts, including Australian texts, and making intertextual connections. In doing so, students come to understand connections between purpose, audience, and context, and how these are achieved through language and stylistic choices. Students demonstrate their understanding of these links by producing, for example, an analytical essay, article, blog, website, documentary, or special features film (behind the scenes about the making of a film), or an oral reflection on language and stylistic features chosen to create a text.

Students consider the impact and influence of language features (e.g. sentence structure, punctuation, figurative language) and stylistic features (e.g. tone, imagery, layout, nominalisation, analogies, juxtaposition).

Students analyse the ideas, perspectives, and influences expressed in texts and how these shape their own and others’ ideas and perspectives. This analysis may include, for example:

• looking at ways in which events are reported differently in the media by evaluating how ideas, attitudes, and voices are represented to position the readers
• examining the effectiveness of ways in which anecdotes are used in speeches to entertain, inform, or influence
• investigating the use of characterisation in advertising.

Students analyse ways in which language and stylistic features shape perspectives and influence readers in a variety of modes. This may include:

• evaluating the effects of rhetorical devices, such as constructing arguments with emphasis, emotive language, and imagery
• analysing the effects of using multimodal conventions in navigation, sound, lighting, and image
• investigating ways in which mood and attitude are created through the use of humour in satire and parody
• examining how different registers and language choices in English are applied for different purposes in different cultures or communities.