Essential Questions:
How can language empower or oppress a group of people? How can a text empower or oppress (marginalize) a group of people?
How can tone and mood affect the relationship between the reader and the text?
How does the cultural context of a text and its reader affect its meaning?
What are elements (content and structural elements) of an effective critical response paper?
Anchor Text:
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Supplementary Text Tuesdays:
April 9th: Harlem Renaissance: 1-2 Langston Hughes Poems, Short video on Harlem Renaissance:
-Negro Speaks Of Rivers, The Weary Blues, Harlem [2]
April 16th: Zora Neale Hurston: Story in Harlem Slang
April 23rd: Language & Power: History of the English Language in 10 Minutes
April 30th: Next Renaissance of TEWWG-Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” & Oprah
Wednesday, May 8th: Richard Wright - Between Laughter and Tears
May 14th: bell hooks essay (?)
May 21st: Audre Lorde - The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (Speech)
Formative Assessments:
Weekly Quizzes: Analyzing a stylistic/literary device within a passage from Their Eyes Were Watching God
Rough Draft and outline for Written Task #2
Summative Assessment:
Written Task #2: Critical Response Essay
Uniting Learning Targets:
Identify the intended audience and purpose of different types of texts.
Describe how a text’s meaning is determined by the reader and by the cultural context.
Describe whose views are included and whose are excluded, marginalized, or silenced within a text.
Describe the relationship between language, culture, and power.
Understand the differences between content and theme of different types of texts.
Describe the tone and mood of text using appropriate vocabulary.
Identify several common stylistic and literary devices employed by writers.
Reading Schedule/Shared Inquiry Sign up:
See student shared inquiry schedule here.
Writing Workshop Topics:
April 10th: Writing a thesis statement and intro paragraphs for analysis papers
April 17th/April 24th: Writing Body Paragraphs (includes formatting quotes and analysis)
May 1st: Developing an outline
-Here’s a model outline for a comparative essay
May 15th: Writing a conclusion
May 22nd: Identifying common mistakes in writing. (Also see: “Four Ways To Invigorate Your Writing,” from IB English Language book, pages 26-27) Common proof-reading symbols
Stylistic and Literary Elements & Devices:
April 8th: Metaphor/Figurative Language, opening passage.
April 15th: Dialogue/Dialect
April 22th: Content/Theme (Loss of languages, cultural suicide/genocide/power) (controversial issue: do we lose/gain cultural/regional dialects in the age of globalization and advancements in technology?)
April 29th: Audience/Purpose
May 13th: Mood/Tone
May 20th: Symbolism (symbolism of silence...)
Supplementary Text Presentation Sign Up: