Hi Standard English Students and Teachers!
I'd like to open some discussion on an aspect of the new HSC English syllabus. In Standard English, Module A, Experience Through Language, there are two new electives. The first is called Distinctive Voices and the second, Distinctively Visual. As a retired English teacher, now tutoring HSC students, I am inviting the ideas of other teachers or students on this topic.
The wording of the new module is the same as it was in the old syllabus. Depending on which elective you got, you had to focus on written, spoken or visual language. However, in the new syllabus, even though it's implied that you're still dealing with three types of language, there are only two electives. This is only a guess, but I think that in the first elective, Distinctive Voices, you have to focus on spoken language, and in the second, Distinctively Visual, you have to focus on written and visual language. This seems to be borne out when you look at the text list too.
The texts in Distinctive Voices seem to have conversational or spoken threads running through them, which are quite clearly being referred to as voices. The second elective, Distinctively Visual, however, is not as straight forward to interpret. What exactly is meant by “the images we see and/or visualize”? Again, I'm guessing, but this seems to suggest the images which we visualize directly, using eyesight, as well as the images we visualize in our minds. Moreover, the "and/or" provides a lot of scope, intentionally I suppose, and I would say that this comes from the need which past markers felt for students to differentiate between poetic images, or imagery, and the visual images of visual media. According to past markers' notes, many students in the past mixed these up, and consequently lost marks. My guess is that this was a deciding factor when the new syllabus was being dreamt up. In the new module therefore, through their choice of related texts, students will be expected to show that they understand this difference. This too, seems to be borne out, somewhat, by glancing at the texts themselves, which range from poetry, which uses mental images, to films, which use the visual sense. The pivotal word is visual, which is being used ambiguously to mean either visually visual or mentally visual.
But this is just supposition. As a full time teacher I could chew such things over at lunchtime or nut it out at meeting. Nowadays I depend on cyberspace, so I would appreciate some feedback from anyone with similar concerns about this module's unclearness.
Paul
MrPBarbary.com
I'd like to open some discussion on an aspect of the new HSC English syllabus. In Standard English, Module A, Experience Through Language, there are two new electives. The first is called Distinctive Voices and the second, Distinctively Visual. As a retired English teacher, now tutoring HSC students, I am inviting the ideas of other teachers or students on this topic.
The wording of the new module is the same as it was in the old syllabus. Depending on which elective you got, you had to focus on written, spoken or visual language. However, in the new syllabus, even though it's implied that you're still dealing with three types of language, there are only two electives. This is only a guess, but I think that in the first elective, Distinctive Voices, you have to focus on spoken language, and in the second, Distinctively Visual, you have to focus on written and visual language. This seems to be borne out when you look at the text list too.
The texts in Distinctive Voices seem to have conversational or spoken threads running through them, which are quite clearly being referred to as voices. The second elective, Distinctively Visual, however, is not as straight forward to interpret. What exactly is meant by “the images we see and/or visualize”? Again, I'm guessing, but this seems to suggest the images which we visualize directly, using eyesight, as well as the images we visualize in our minds. Moreover, the "and/or" provides a lot of scope, intentionally I suppose, and I would say that this comes from the need which past markers felt for students to differentiate between poetic images, or imagery, and the visual images of visual media. According to past markers' notes, many students in the past mixed these up, and consequently lost marks. My guess is that this was a deciding factor when the new syllabus was being dreamt up. In the new module therefore, through their choice of related texts, students will be expected to show that they understand this difference. This too, seems to be borne out, somewhat, by glancing at the texts themselves, which range from poetry, which uses mental images, to films, which use the visual sense. The pivotal word is visual, which is being used ambiguously to mean either visually visual or mentally visual.
But this is just supposition. As a full time teacher I could chew such things over at lunchtime or nut it out at meeting. Nowadays I depend on cyberspace, so I would appreciate some feedback from anyone with similar concerns about this module's unclearness.
Paul
MrPBarbary.com
Last edited:
???????
