Making meaning is at the heart of the DP language and literature course. In their reading of literary and non-literary texts, students learn to make meaning of author’s craft as well as the messages within each text. The three areas of exploration in the language and literature – Readers, writers, and texts, time and space, and intertextuality – help students study the construction of meaning from three perspectives. How might we introduce students to these perspectives and get them started on this ‘meaningful’ journey?
With these ready-to-use interactive lessons, you can help students unpack the areas of exploration and dig deeper into how meaning is constructed and communicated. Designed as an editable student-facing slide deck, it introduces the basics of textual analysis and is well-suited for students early in the course. For both literary and non-literary texts, the following questions are explored:
- What is meaning and where does it come from?
- How is meaning constructed differently in different texts?
- How do the areas of exploration help us interpret meaning?
Featuring literary texts by Robert Frost and William Shakespeare, and non-literary texts by Richard McGuire and Adriane Tomine, this deck can be flexibly adapted to suit your purposes: from a stand-alone lesson to an interactive discussion spread out over a whole week.
Ideas for using this slide deck:
- Break students into teams. Have them compete to create the most detailed list of similarities and differences between the two non-literary texts.
- Challenge the students to interpret the Shakespeare poem. Listen to a few attempts, then perform a live explication and annotation to build on their understanding.
- Reveal the works you’ve selected for the course. Students can conduct research on each work, then speculate on which work(s) are best aligned with each area of exploration.
