Constructing Texts
Time 20 mins

Difficulty Beginner
Prerequisites What is a Text?
Departments English
Authors Jon Rees
Groupings Individual
Pairs
Threes
Fours
Fives
Minimum Year Group None

Blurb

Your exploration of English in free learning will now diverge into two main strands: Constructing texts and De-Constructing texts. In the construction stage we will learn how to get creative and write a range of different text types within both language and literature. There are SO MANY types of text we might be able to create: advertisements, speeches, text messages, emails, letters (formal and informal), news articles and opinion editorials all fall under the bracket of LANGUAGE-based texts. Literary texts include the three pillars of POETRY, DRAMA (plays) and NOVELS.

License

This work is shared under the following license: Creative Commons BY-SA-NC

Outline

Resources
What is needed to run this unit?
  • ...
Cross-Curricular Links
Do not try and force this. What areas of other subjects might this reflect and/discuss language. For IB, links with ToK.
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Teacher Reflection
What was successful? What needs changing? Alternative Assessments and Lesson Ideas? What other Differentiation Ideas/Plans could be used?
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Credits
Any CC attribution, thanks, credit, etc.

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5 mins
Revision
Language and Literary Texts

In the construction stage, we will learn how to get creative and write a range of different text types within both language and literature. There are SO MANY types of text we might be able to create:

  1. advertisements,
  2. speeches,
  3. text messages,
  4. emails,
  5. letters (formal and informal),
  6. news articles and
  7. opinion editorials

all fall under the bracket of LANGUAGE-based texts.


LITERARY texts include the three pillars of

  1. poetry,
  2. drama (plays), and
  3. novels.
15 mins
Identifying literary texts vs language texts.
Classification Exercise

Create a Google Docs document entitled: "Identifying Literary vs Language Texts". Then, create a 2-column table as shown below.

Literary Texts  Language Texts

In this simple classification exercise, insert the 6 different types of sample texts below into the correct column. Once you're done, submit it as evidence for this unit.
*You can also mark down the type of text you think it is, they are all from the above lists of texts*

Text no. Text Sample
1

If— 


If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

New Outcry as Trump Rebukes Charlottesville Racists 2 Days Later

By GLENN THRUSH AUG. 14, 2017

WASHINGTON — The crisis in Charlottesville, Va., presented President Trump with a choice between adopting the unifying tone of a traditional president or doubling down on the go-it-alone approach that got him elected in 2016.

On Monday, Mr. Trump offered a glimpse of a more calming and conventional president, but he ended the day with a flurry of angry tweets that left little doubt he intended to govern on his own terms....

3 "Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone — fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens..."
4

In 1939, I didn’t hear war coming. Now its thundering approach can’t be ignored

Harry Leslie Smith
As a teenager I would just laugh at newsreels of Hitler and other fascists. I hope what happened next is not witnessed again by my grandchildren’s generation 

chill of remembrance has come over me during this August month. It feels as if the 2017 summer breeze is being scattered by the winds of war blowing from across our world towards Britain, just like they were in 1939.

In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia eviscerates Yemen with the same ferocity as Mussolini did to Ethiopia when I was child in 1935. The hypocrisy of Britain’s government and elite class ensures that innocent blood still flows in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Theresa May’s government insists that peace can only be achieved through the proliferation of weapons of war in conflict zones. Venezuela teeters towards anarchy and foreign intervention while in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte – protected by his alliance with Britain and the US – murders the vulnerable for the crime of trying to escape their poverty through drug addiction.

Because I am old, now 94, I recognise these omens of doom. Chilling signs are everywhere, perhaps the biggest being that the US allows itself to be led by Donald Trump, a man deficient in honour, wisdom and just simple human kindness. It is as foolish for Americans to believe that their generals will save them from Trump as it was for liberal Germans to believe the military would protect the nation from Hitler’s excesses.

5

ACT ONE At the rise of the curtain someone is taking a shower in the bathroom, the door of which is half open. A pretty young woman, with anxious lines in her face, enters the bedroom and crosses to the bathroom door.

MARGARET [shouting above roar of water]: One of those no-neck monsters hit me with a hot buttered biscuit so I havet' change!

[Margaret's voice is both rapid and drawling. In her long speeches she has the vocal tricks of a priest delivering a liturgical chant, the lines are almost sung, always continuing a little beyond her breath so she has to gasp for another. Sometimes she intersperses the lines with a little wordless singing, such as "Da-da-daaaa" | Water turns off and Brick calls out to her, but is still unseen. A tone of politely feigned interest, masking indifference, or worse, is characteristic of his speech with Margaret.]

BRICK: Wha'd you say, Maggie? Water was on s' loud I couldn't hear ya.... 

6

"I Have a Dream" by Martin Luther King

"I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition..."

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Unit Students

Charlotte
Shared on 28/01/2019
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