Friday 23 January 2015

Mentor Texts

The Mentor text I chose was a movie review on the recent film American Sniper from the New York Daily News. I chose this text as a way to teach conveying meaning and intentions in writing for an English class. This type of lesson would probably be used for a grade 11 or 12 class. The review itself never actually gives a thumbs up or thumbs down type response, but the language used by the author implies a positive review. I think it would be an interesting way for students to grasp how language can affect meaning without being overtly stated. This lesson could provide students with deeper critical thinking skills in assessing bias and perspective, as well as writing skills to help properly convey meaning. Coming from a history background as well, it would be interesting to use this mentor text in a history unit. It might be fun and engaging for students to write a review of a movie through a historical perspective where they could argue for or against the validity of the movie as a fictional member of the society being depicted. In this case, it would be appropriate to use some of the mini-lessons from chapter 7 of the Peterson reading including spelling, grammar, punctuation, homophones, etc. The mentor text could serve as a guide by re-arranging sentences to convey different meaning due to poor punctuation, grammar, etc.

1 comment:

  1. Neil, I think your idea of trying to showcase to students how language can affect meaning without being overtly stated is an important lesson in the classroom, especially because it may carry over to their everyday writing/texting outside of the classroom. Also, I agree that working with this article would be a great opportunity to work with critical thinking skills and what a great idea of using it in a history unit. That sort of reading/activity in a history class is unexpected but very effective in getting beneath the politics of representation.

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