9. Making your own book - Audience

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.

• SMART teaching strategies for targeting an audience

• BBC Bitesize Senior English – Writing for Genre, audience, purpose and style

• BBC Bitesize Primary English – Creative and narrative writing

• Teaching resources aimed at persuasive writing for NAPLAN that could be adapted

• English teaching resources collated by NSW primary school teacher Shellie Tancred

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).

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.'