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Language Bullies Eating Cheesecake, Circa 2013 Free
How is work? Are you coping? Teaching is, after all, a demanding profession. The rewards are not always pecuniary, the ‘long’ holidays hardly compensate for the punishing demands of term time, and then...
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Language, Gender, and Power
Each of us is enculturated. This is a lifelong process in which our identities are formed. Through enculturation, we learn many things. Not least, perhaps, we learn gendered identities of what it is...
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Motivation: drop the carrot and the stick! Free
I once spoke to one of my form group students (that’s a home room student or a tutee, for those not familiar with UK terminology) about her general lack of motivation – in all school subjects - to read...
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Digging, and the Mutable Life of Pronouns Free
Seamus Heaney is dead. A good friend, who knows Heaney’s poetry well, texted me with the sad news. He wrote, ‘best poet of our generation’. One of the aims of the Language and Literature course is to...
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WT SL (Digging)
The following Written Task is published in memory of Seamus Heaney. This week, whilst reading Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, I noticed the character of Joe Keller, described in the stage directions as...
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Marxism, feminism & Freud
Part of understanding the context of interpretation is realizing that readers come to the table with their own agenda. In other words, people look to literature to prove their theories on how the world...
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Sex in ads
In the fashion world, the depiction of sex is often used to sell products. One could argue that 'sex' is a stylistic device commonly found in print ads. It is the language of persuasion. However, ads...
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Vote Different!
The language of persuasion can be very subtle. Often times, voters are persuaded by ads that attack an opponent, called smear campaigns or attack ads. They are not always produced directly by the political...
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Form and content
Like the written task, the further oral activity is a marriage of form and content. Students can do a debate, interview or role play based on their understanding of 'course material' and 'texts'. However,...
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Graphic novel
Are you studying a graphic novel for Part 3 of your syllabus? Persepolis, Maus, and Watchmen are a few of the popular texts in this genre. Before you discuss these texts, however, it helps to know some...