"You are to write a short story of a childhood memory or a memory that has defined your relationship with a parent or carer."
This was a weekly exercise task I was expected to complete for one of my University courses. When I first read this instruction I felt confused and worried that I could not complete the task at hand. Was I to write reflectively or creatively, should it be written in first person or third person and was it to be biographical or autobiographical in nature. And this is where I understood the semantic nature of texts.
My confusion of the task was cleared by my readings of other pieces of work that reflected on parent-child relationships and the use of varying writing conventions to convey this. Some of the texts I read included:
Through the knowledge of similar texts and my own reactions towards each of these texts I was able to identify features of autobiographical writing which assisted me in construction of my own text. Not only was I using the Available design and redesign methods (New London Group 1996) discussed in my earlier blog on 'Multiliteracies' I was also taking the role of 'Text Participant' outlined in in Freebody and Luke's Literacy Model (1999). This role allowed me to engage with Personal literacy through drawing on my prior experiences and understandings of similar texts.
As teachers we can encourage students to engage in personal literacy through asking them questions (Ludwig 2004) such as:
Does the text remind you of
something that has happened to you?
What did you feel as you read
the text?
What might happen next?
No comments:
Post a Comment