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Topic: Reading

The reading part of the Englicious site is designed to provide resources which help students develop their analysis and interpretation skills. In the reading topics you will find activities and resources matched to different Assessment Focuses (Key Stages 3-4) and Assessment Objectives (A level).

Foregrounding

Foregrounding is a widely-used term in text analysis, literary linguistics and stylistics, referring to patterns of language that stand out in a text. The term itself is derived from art and film criticism, and is best understood by a visual analogy.

Goal

Noticing and exploring linguistic patterns in literary texts.

Here is a picture of San Francisco:

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Foregrounding - activity

In pairs or small groups, explore instances of grammatical foregrounding in Funeral Blues. This could be done by producing an analysis grid, where students examine how a grammatical feature of the text is foregrounded, and most importantly, discuss the potential meaning of the foregrounded feature. How do the instances of foregrounding add to our understanding and enjoyment of the poem?

To get you started, here are a couple of ideas:

Grammatical feature

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Genre of Advertisements

Lesson Plan

Goals: 

  • Identify common discourse and register features of advertisements
  • Analyse how these features are used to achieve the desired effects 
  • Plan, write and evaluate an advert using the same features 

Lesson Plan

Before this lesson, you may want to complete the lesson An Introduction to Genre, so that learners are familiar with the key terms discourse structure and register

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Genre of Advertisements

Activities

Warmer 

Discuss with a partner: 

  • What adverts did you see on the way to school today? What made them memorable?
  • What advert have you seen recently that stuck in your mind? Why? 
  • What kind of writing and information do we normally see in adverts? 

Activity 1 

In pairs or small groups, read Adverts A and B. Take turns describing each text, and then discuss with your partner: 

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Genre of Newspaper Articles

Lesson Plan

Goals:

  • Identify and analsye the discourse features of newspaper articles
  • Identify and analsye the register features of newspaper articles
  • Apply these features in writing 

Lesson Plan

Before this lesson, you may want to complete the lesson An Introduction to Genre, so that learners are familiar with the key terms discourse structure and register

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Genre of Newspaper Articles

Activities

Warmer 

Discuss with a partner: 

  • What was the last newspaper article you read? What was it about? 
  • Why do people read newspapers and news websites?  
  • What features do we expect to see in a newspaper article? Why are they used? 

Activity 1

Read Article A. Discuss the following questions: 

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