9. Making your own book - Audience

Viewing guide

Before

Teacher to:

review the ideas of creating a text for a specific audience
elicit discussion of the characteristics that their class has as an audience
guide a comparison of these characteristics with those of an adult or younger audience.

Students to:

analyse whether there are any universal characteristics of an audience
record some characteristics of the audience they have chosen for their book in their journal.

After

Teacher to:

facilitate a discussion about the concept of purpose in text creation
guide students to think about the different possible purposes their text could have, such as education or entertainment.

Students to:

review the characteristics of their chosen audience and think about the different purposes they might apply to texts written for this audience
record their decision making process and final decision
review their draft text, images and all their ideas for the book
create a new plan/draft of their book incorporating ideas based on the audience and purpose they have chosen.

Teaching notes

This lesson is designed to support students to think critically about their audience and the purpose of their text. By the end of this lesson students should have a solid idea of their text, with a plan written or sketched out. They should also have mapped out the story elements (hook, complication and conclusion) for the narrative.

Depending on the ability levels of the class this activity could take place over more than one lesson.

Writing with purpose

The following resources provide ideas and information that will help you teach your students to write for a specific audience and with a clear purpose in mind.

Learning intention

Completing this activity affords students the opportunity to:

communicate effectively for a variety of audiences and purposes using increasingly challenging topics, ideas, issues and language forms and features (EN3-1A)
compose, edit and present well-structured and coherent texts (EN3-2A)
discuss how language is used to achieve a widening range of purposes for a widening range of audiences and contexts (EN3-5B)
recognise, reflect on and assess their strengths as a learner (EN3-9E).

Transcript

Alison Lester: But these are some of the books that I've made when I've been travelling around different schools and it's nice for you to just see how easy it is to make a book. This is from a place called Maningrida, which is way up in the north where the kids don't speak very much English, so it was made as a book to learn English. 'We go hunting, hunting kangaroos in the bushes with our rifles. We go hunting, hunting goannas in a hole with our sticks. We go hunting, hunting stingrays in the creek with our fish wires.' So you can see the kids have done all the pictures and they look fantastic. 'We go hunting, hunting for file snakes in the billabong with our hands.' File snakes are these big fat things like pythons with really baggy, rough skin and you have to feel in the mud for them, like this. Ooh! And there's always crocodiles in there too. And it goes through many, many huntings until the last one is, 'We go hunting, hunting paddle-pops in the tuckshop with our money.'