Workshop Preparation Discussion, Week 7 (Petrina)

The activities this week would be particularly useful in assisting students to become more critically literate text-analysts, especially since the texts chosen are everyday artefacts that create connections with students’ lives beyond the classroom.  For example, assisting students as text-users to interpret nutrition panels on products such as breakfast cereals scaffolds them as code-breakers and text-participants by providing them with background knowledge necessary to judge the validity of the claims being made on the rest of the packaging (One breakfast biscuit may well be ‘exciting’, ‘delicious’ and ‘rich in cereals’, but it is also one quarter sugar.).  Comparing newspaper articles/reports also illustrates the manner in which authors can seek to manipulate readers’ responses (e.g. Is state politics experiencing everyday ‘tensions’ and ‘rivalries’ or is it in fact a war-zone, with ‘forces mobilising’ and ‘battleground marginal seats’?).  This second activity further emphasises the need to assist students to become discerning readers and consumers, drawing on the four reader roles.