Teaching for creativity development

Secondary English Curriculum

Essential English

The Essential English course forms a bridge between the students and community. This course will scaffold and develop the students’ literacy and is designed to be a pathway into work and society. The focus will be on ASE as the standard, however linguistic inflexions will be considered under the scope of the verbal and visual language systems of English. This program is intertextual in context and enhances learning through the metacognitive processes. In certain activities contextual study of language to link to individual literacy needs are explored. In a positive classroom climate and a responsible learning ethos as the whole school policy this course can prepare for the effective transition from school to community through English Language, Literature and Literacy.

Course outcomes:

Use language effectively:

Use of vocabulary to hone effectiveness of communication in personal, social, academic and workplace settings.

Examine the relationship between language, context and meaning through studying: everyday transactions, social and community reports, workplace procedures and expositions regarding work ethics.

Study literary texts such as graphic novels, films, plays and poetry.

Process:

Example tasks for orientation of learners and as a scaffold towards a development of a reader response.

a) Writing letters (informal) of a personal nature;

b) Responding to issues in society (reflective journals);

c) Academic writing (essays) and

Skill development:

Research

Planning

Reflecting

Evaluating

Factors assessed:

Reading Contextually

Reading Creatively

Reading Analytically

Assessment:

Continuous assessment with shared percentage mark and based on work portfolio and weekly assessment.

Intertextuality : My reading of literary theory

My reading of The Dialogical Principle

Written by Tzvetan Todorov on the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin

Literary theory is an examination of the science of language. Bakhtin explicated the role of Intertextuality in his theory of the Dialogical Principle. He theorised that interpretation is responsive understanding. In the early 1920s two axes of literary criticism were current. The first was stylistic criticism. The critics belonging to this school gave prominence to individual expression in reading and interpretation of texts. The second school was that of structural criticism. These theorists based their discourse on the structure of language. They focused on the role of langue in their reading and interpretation of texts. In essence the structural linguists gave primacy to the abstract grammatical form at the expense of other aspects of language. Bakhtins theory was neither stylistic nor structural. He posited a method which lay between these two axes of literary theory. He used his description of the privileged object to forward his argument. For Bakhtin human utterance is the product of the interaction of langue and the context of utterance. Furthermore, context refers to history and belongs to the past because it exists before the individual and as such context belongs to history. Therefore, he continues, human utterance should become an object of inquiry; a new science named Translinguistics.

The theory of Bakhtin, with its focus on human utterance, displays the Intertextual dimension by noting that each utterance is a dialogue in context. Language is a product of human understanding and thus every utterance is a repetition of named objects and used words.

The following reading is based on my handwritten notes and therefore my reading.The reference will be posted in a new post,and will be a comprehensive syllabus dating back to my years a s a research scholar.