Hierarchies in diversities: what students' examined responses tell us about literacy practices in contemporary school English.
Macken-Horarik, Mary
The text is a transformation of the specialised interactional practice ... a form of the social relationship made visible, palpable, material ... and it should be possible to recover the original specialised interactional practice from an analysis of its text(s) in context. (Bernstein, 1990, p. 17) Language actively symbolises the social system, representing metaphorically in its patterns of variation the variation that characterises human cultures. This is what enables people to play with variation in language, using it to create meanings of a social kind: to participate in all forms of verbal contest and verbal display, and in the elaborate rhetoric of ordinary daily conversation. (Halliday, 1978, p. 3)
The dilemma of diversity and the problem of examination English
New English curriculum across Australia has not only increased the range of texts on offer for formal study, but has also multiplied the literacy practices for engaging with these new objects of study. Traditional print modes of the novel and the poetry anthology now jostle for space on the curriculum 'table' beside multimodal forms of communication such as documentaries, feature films, websites, cartoons and hypertext literature. At the same time, ways of reading and responding to these texts have also proliferated. Perhaps the most popular and persuasive model of the 'multiple literacies' is the 'four resources' model, produced by literacy researchers, Peter Freebody and Allan Luke. They argue that 'effective literacy in complex print and multimediated societies requires a broad and flexible repertoire of practices" (Freebody and Luke, 2003, p. 56, my italics). A repertoire is a store of things or skills of a particular kind possessed by a person or a group. Luke and Freebody (2002) maintain that students need access to the four following key resources and practices: 'code breaking' (decoding the orthographic features of texts such as alphabet, sounds in words, spelling and structural conventions), 'text participation' (understanding and composing meaningful written, visual and multimodal texts), 'text use' strategies (using texts functionally and pragmatically), and 'text analysis' (critical analysis and transformation of texts). This multifaceted model makes great intuitive sense to teachers, and has greatly influenced literacy curriculum and research across Australia. The curriculum package, MyRead, is one popular application of the 'four resources' model to the teaching of reading (Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, 2003).
However, if we consider just one resource identified within this model--that of 'text participation--clearly there are different ways of participating in the meaning of literary texts. Some repertoires are more highly valued than others, especially when it comes to text interpretation in examinations. One such test is the New South Wales School Certificate examination in English, which invites students to respond to literary or other crafted texts. While all literacy tests project an image of which literacy practices 'count' in this version of English, tasks that appear most open in their requirements are often most difficult for students. Creative or interpretive responses are required in most system-wide tests of English in Australia from Year 10 onwards. They dominate in senior study, even in states or territories (such as the ACT and Queensland) that do not impose an external examination on students in Year 12. In this paper, I concentrate on the interpretive task typical of the Year 10 School Certificate.
An open question about an unseen text (e.g. 'What do you think of the story?' or 'Why do you think the story ends in this way?') gives every student the chance to participate in the task (gets everyone writing). From the point of view of the examiner, it 'nets in' all possible responses, ensuring that all can be evaluated. It is inclusive in its invitation to responsiveness. But this kind of task is a janus construct. Its other face turns towards the examination and the examiners' need to discriminate between different forms of text participation. In New South Wales (as in many states who impose basic skills tests on students), it is classroom teachers who assume the role of examiners. When they assess texts produced by unknown students, they arrange the (potentially unlimited) responses on a limited hierarchy of grades from successful (A-range) down to unsatisfactory (D and E-range). The innovative and even transgressive texts and practices many value in their own classrooms are overturned in favour of the traditional 'literary response' (Macken-Horarik, 1996, 2001). In this context, the possibilities of diversity narrow and teachers themselves become the locus of contradictory impulses to both inclusiveness and stratification.
Much has been written about the 'problem' of diverse practices in school English. For Ian Hunter, English is constituted by an unstable amalgam of three competences: linguistic competence (or rhetoric), literary appreciation (or aesthetics) and personal development (or ethics). In his account, the exercise of literary interpretation takes place within the confines of a special supervisory relationship between teacher/assessor and student (Hunter, 1994, 1997). Any literacy practice is subject to this supervisory role, and this surveillance aspect of the discipline is only intensified in formal assessment situations. Other theorists who have recognised the indeterminacy at the heart of English view it in a more positive light, construing a more modest role for English in the development of diverse but powerful 'literate habits' (Patterson, 1997; Reid, 2003). When we turn our attention to examination practices in school English, it is clear that some literacy repertoires, some forms of participation in text meaning, are more valuable (because more valued) than others. Teachers need mechanisms for unpacking these repertoires, not least through metalinguistic frameworks that make different fashions of meaning more visible, more accessible for students.
Addressing the problematic
This paper investigates the fate of diverse literacy practices through semantic analysis of the written texts produced by students in response to an open question about an examination narrative. It proposes a metalinguistic framework for 'reading' students' different readings, one that builds on earlier research into Year 10 narratives (Rothery and Macken, 1991) and responses to narrative (Macken-Horarik, 1996 and 2001). This research established a hiatus between curriculum diversity and examination exclusiveness and a serious lack of awareness amongst teachers about their own role in the stratification process.
In the research on which I report here, I set out to 'test' my earlier insights into the literacy practices actually valued in examination English against a new corpus released to the researcher following the 1995 New South Wales Reference Test. I used semantic analysis of 26 responses at different achievement levels to a narrative called The RedBack Spider. The paper asks: what do texts and readings produced by students in response to an open question about an unseen narrative have to teach us about literacy practices in contemporary school English?
Semantic analysis of students' texts is pivotal in an examination of linguistic and institutional stratification of different literacy repertoires. Here the text is a record not only of a student's ability to read and respond to the text presented (short story, poem or essay), but also of his or her ability to read the institutional hierarchies at the heart of the open question. In this sense, as Bernstein has reminded us, students' texts and the grades they attract make social relationships visible, palpable, material' (Bernstein, 1990, p. 17). This is not to suggest that we can 'read off' social significance of a text on the basis of linguistic analysis. Rather, it is to show how social hierarchies winnow textual choices through the assignment of particular grades to particular combinations of semantic choices in students' texts. In short, if examiners grade students' responses on the basis of the meaning potentials their texts make available, attention to the language choices made in these is crucial.
Analytical framework
The analytical metalanguage employed in this study assumes, as Halliday (1978) has argued, that text variation is metaphorically related to variation in social processes. Variation in students' texts provide a window on their uptake of the vast meaning potential that is school English. When we connect this uptake with evaluation (the grades responses attract), we have a greater purchase on the fate of diversity and of different literacy repertoires in examination English. In this enterprise, our tools of analysis should allow us to capture students' diverse fashions of meaning (as these are instantiated in response texts) and to connect these to the institutionalised practices of school English (as these are embodied in examinations). In this way, we can interrogate the fate of different literacy repertoires--the (examination) hierarchies in (curriculum) diversities.
Systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL) not only connects linguistic and social practices. It is 'polyfunctional' in its exploration of these (Halliday, 1994; Martin, 1992; Martin and Rose, 2003). For example, it enables us to look at any text, or indeed at any clause in a text, from the point of view of three major kinds of meaning: ideational, interpersonal and textual. Each metafunction provides a different 'lens' on the meaning potential activated in a text. This meaning potential can be described in ideational terms (using an experiential lens on the 'content' of the text and a logical lens on the ways in which a writer connects or inter-relates messages). It can be described using an interpersonal lens on the evaluative stance adopted by the speaker or writer. And it can be described through a textual lens on the compositional structures of a text.
The different metafunctional viewpoints give us depth of observation about what is 'going on' in students' writing and allow us to describe syndromes of linguistic choice in their texts, which emanate from a more general orientation to meaning in a given range of achievement (a C or an A grade, for example). We can extend this to an exploration of different forms of participation in the meanings of narrative. Taken together, these trends or syndromes allow us to characterise the semantics underpinning the 'text participation' typical of responses in a given grade range. Taken independently, a response text embodies an individualised rhetoric that reveals how 'this particular student' responds to the interpretive task, inflecting it individually.
Making our analyses accessible is an important aspect of the challenge of educational linguistics, which is my starting point. In this paper, I employ probe questions to show how we can assess the meanings made in students' responses. Each metafunctional view yields a different kind of question. These probes are displayed in Table 1.
Using these probes we can analyse language choices made in students' written texts in semantic terms. For example, we can consider how students construe the 'experience' or content of a text (what it is 'about' for them). Experientially, they may speculate on its enigmas, retell the events and generalise about their 'message' or interpret the abstract significance of the narrative as a 'tissue' of meanings. We can probe the 'logic' of their response (the kinds of connections they make between one clause and another). Logically students may expand messages about narrative 'content' through what is primarily an aggregative, a 'rehearsive' or an elaborating logic. Beyond this, we can probe the evaluative 'stance' students adopt towards the narrative. Interpersonally, students may react subjectively to one or more parts of the text, summarise key characters' feelings and viewpoints or appraise the voices and attitudes embodied in the text as a whole. Finally, we can probe students' 'engagement' with the structure of the narrative. The textual lens focuses on the kinds of attention students pay to the text--whether they engage with local aspects of the text (in an atomistic way) or engage with the text globally (by means of empirical or symbolic attention to the whole).
It is useful for ease of analysis that each of these choices is represented synoptically in a system network capturing meaning-making strategies along metafunctional lines. In this enterprise I draw on the representational tradition of SFL (its systemic aspect, at least) without attempting a detailed technical introduction to the linguistic systems and functions that underpin my insights. The system network has a heuristic value in the current study and enables me to display the above semantic choices in a systematic way. Authoritative introductions to tools and methods of analysis relevant to each metafunction can be found in Halliday (1994), Martin (1992), Eggins (1994) and Martin and Rose (2003). Figure 1 lays out the semantic choices identified above. Each of these is explored in detail in later sections through three examples from my corpus of responses.
It should be obvious from the outset that the choices for generating a response to narrative do not freely combine. In fact, fashions of meaning are not idiosyncratic, but shaped by reading repertoires, and we can characterise these generally, such that particular combinations of linguistic choices index a type of reading. Three reading repertoires appear to dominate at different levels of achievement in examination English. I use the term 'tactical' to refer to the least successful reading (E or D grade range), the term 'mimetic' to refer to the moderately successful reading (C grade range) and the term 'symbolic' to refer to the successful reading (A grade range). Before moving on to detailed exemplification of each reading, I consider the narrative text that occasioned them and the particular question students were asked about this text in the New South Wales Reference Test.
Background to the examination narrative and the open question
Most unseen narratives presented to Year 10 students in English examinations share certain features. They have to be short enough to read in an examination, and they often feature characters and events deemed to be relevant to all young people and their experiential dilemmas and rites of passage. They often embody a young person's struggle with contradictions between fantasy and reality, desire and social sanction or strangers and social prejudice (Macken-Horarik, 1996 and 2003).
The narrative in focus here is reproduced in the appendix. It was adapted from a short story by Peter Skryznecki for the 1995 School Certificate Reference Test examination in New South Wales. It is about a migrant boy and his mother going to work clearing weeds in a garden of an Australian woman, Mrs Burnett, who appears to be a racist. She shows no courtesy or welcome to the pair and, in fact, refuses to let the boy play with the toys he has found while sheltering under her house from the hot sun. She also ignores the mother's discovery of a dangerous red-back spider in a tin at the bottom of the garden. The story focuses on the young boy's growing awareness of Mrs Burnett's persecutory attitude to the pair and his mother's emotional response to this rejection. The problematic underlying the examination narrative can be framed as a young boy's introduction to racial prejudice in post-war Australia. But this is never enounced clearly in the text; it is left implicit in the mother's emotional response to Mrs Burnett's harsh uncaring words and the boy's growing awareness of the significance of her rebuff.
As it happens, the implicitness of the narrative is partly a result of the Board's adaptation of the original. This examination text had a different ending from the author's version--a fact that greatly affects the intelligibility and transparency of the narrative's problematic. The difficulty of interrelating events to do with the spider with those to do with Mrs Burnett's treatment of the boy is compounded by the examination question. It reads:</p> <pre> Although the story is called The Red-Back Spider, it ends with the words, '... I knew it was nothing to do with the spider.' What do you think the story is about? How does the writer make it an effective story? </pre> <p>Many students who found it hard to understand the text when reading it quickly under exam conditions were clearly thrown off balance by the wording of this 'open' question. It doubles the difficulty of comprehension, and hence of effective participation in the text. Students would have to assume that their usual reliance on the title of the story (about a red-back spider) and on their reading of the last half of the text (about the discovery and destruction of the spider and her children) was of no use in making sense of the narrative. The question can be implicitly reworded as 'What is the text really about?'
As it turns out, students who paid too much attention to the 'redherring' posed by the question did poorly on this response task. Those who ignored this false lead and went on to interpret the story in the light of the spider metaphor were among the higher achieving students (at least in A-range texts from my corpus). Some open questions are more challenging than others. Some convert openness into confusion for students.
Although I have analysed all 26 of the responses given to me in late 1997 for research purposes by the New South Wales Board of Studies, I present only three in this paper (one for each reading). These examples are semantically typical of responses in each grade range. They can be found in the appendix following the narrative. Earlier research was based on published samples of student responses and included both grades and comments from examiners (Macken-Horarik, 1996). The current responses were selected randomly by officers from the Board at top, middle and bottom ranges of achievement. No examiners' commentaries were included in this batch, and could not therefore be used to corroborate linguistic analysis of texts at different grades. In exploring the fashions of meaning typical of each reading, I use the probes outlined in Table I to organise my analysis and discussion of each example text.
I turn now to a consideration of the linguistic features of what I have called the tactical reading.
The linguistic features of the tactical reading
While institutions have the power to act strategically, to make demands on those who participate in its activities and benefit from this participation, individuals can also resist institutional positioning and act tactically in a way that is more relevant to their own interests and desires. The notion of the tactical reading is taken from the work of Michel de Certeau, who explored the ways in which individuals respond to the demands of institutions (de Certeau, 1984). Cranny-Francis (1996) has applied the idea of the 'tactic' to her interpretation of aberrant readings of a narrative in one English classroom. Like the text in focus in this paper, the short story presented to students in this classroom contained interpretive 'gaps' that students had to fill in order to understand the actions of key characters (a narrative called The Weapon, by Fredric Brown). Their interpretations of what happened in this story were not only a mystery to their teacher--appearing to diverge inexplicably from those embodied in the narrative; they failed to account for language choices made in the text as a whole. Unlike a critical reading that identifies and problematises the discourses naturalised in a narrative, a tactical reading engages only fitfully with the unfolding meaning potential of the text. A tactical reading is typically a partial reading of narrative, and this limits greatly the extent to which students can 'participate' in the meanings of a text.
Studies such as this (Cranny-Francis, 1996) and others like it (Pardoe, 2000) remind us of the importance of trying to understand students' difficulties with challenging narratives without resorting immediately to deficit models of their abilities. This is, above all, a contextual matter. While a personalist response is perfectly apt for many interactions around texts, especially informal contexts such as book clubs (Addington, 2001) or adolescent discussions of media texts (Moss, 2000), it is not valued in formal academic contexts. In fact, as one literary theorist has put it, the tactical reading is 'devoid of institutional backup' (Hawthorn, 1992, p. 41). In the context of the School Certificate examination in focus here, it usually attracts negative comments and low grades (D-E range grades). Of course, not all low-range responses are 'of a piece'. At the lower end of the scale (E grade), responses often 'split off' from the stimulus narrative altogether (reacting to one character or one event in the story). At the higher end of the scale (D grade) responses often engage with narrative semiosis (meaning making) more substantially. For purposes of exemplification, I focus here on the semantic qualities of one D-grade response.
How does the student construe experience in/of the text?
Experientially, a tactical reading construes narrative 'content' as enigmatic. It tends to speculate on concrete details of the story and/or its characters, and to provide extraneous explanations for what happens, or for characters' motives, based on personal experience or attitudes. The speculative orientation is most obvious in this example in the student's attempt to explain the role of the spider in the story: 'But I think the story was not about the spider because it was killed straight away.' Although stymied by the presence of the spider, the student does identify some of the things that happen in the story (2):</p>
<pre> To me it had a few things the story was about. How the father
is away from his wife and son and telling us how the wife is surviving with her son and then is goes near the end of the story how Mrs Burnett reacted when she saw the horse in the pocket and it sounded like she didn't care if they got hurt. </pre> <p>However, these events are plucked out of the text and listed without any sign that their relationship to one another is understood. Experientially, a tactical reading focuses in an idiosyncratic way on isolated particulars of the story and/or its characters.
By what logic does the student generate a response?
The interpretive logic of the tactical reading is most often aggregative, with the student adding or, better, piling up impressions of the text. In what Halliday calls the logic of extension, one clause 'expands another by extending beyond it: adding some new element, giving an exception to it, or offering an alternative' (Halliday, 1994, p. 220). The most common way to extend a message is to use explicit connectives. The 'and-and-and' logic of the tactical reading can be observed in the series of additive conjunctions, shown in bold, using the symbol (+) for extension:</p> <pre> How the father is away from his wife and son (+) and telling us how the wife is surviving with her son (+) and then is goes near the end of the story how Mrs Burnett reacted when she saw the horse in the pocket (+) and it sounded like she didn't care if they got hurt. </pre> <p>Of course, the logic can also be implicit with the student accumulating points about the text without overt use of conjunctions such as 'and', 'or', and sometimes concessive conjunctions such as 'but'. Whether explicitly or implicitly, however, tactical readings tend to expand messages by means aggregation. The approach is to keep adding details (anything the student sees as relevant) about the narrative without overt connections to the logic inherent in the text itself.
How does the student evaluate the text?
Interpersonally, a tactical reading produces a subjective evaluation to one or more parts of the stimulus text. This may lead to a positive or negative reaction to a character, an event or a figure, or to a personal exploration of something that catches the reader's attention. For example, this reader is at a loss to understand why the character responds so meanly to the young boy:</p> <pre> The main thing that caught my attention was when Mrs Burnett asked about the toy horse and told him not to play with the toys. That was the most confusing part of the story when it doesn't say why she acted like that. So there must have been something with those toys he was playing with. </pre> <p>Of course, given Skrzynecki's objections to the Board's misleading adaptation of his original, this student's reflection on his/her difficulty understanding Mrs Burnett's motivation is entirely reasonable. It is hard to discern from this version why Mrs Burnett responds so negatively to the boy's use of the toy soldiers. Even so, 'thinking on paper' is not a highly valued examination tactic. Examiners value an authoritative rather than an exploratory stance in this context.
Framing the evaluation in personalist terms is common in the lower range of achievements, as if readers feel they are required to test the story on their own 'pulses'. This is often reflected in a tendency to preface remarks about the story via projections such as 'I think' or 'I feel', or the personal equivalent, as in:</p> <pre> The effective part of the story to me was at the beginning when it explained what they were doing there in that point of time. To me it had a few things the story was about. </pre> <p>Of course, the invitation to expressions of personal voice is there in the wording of the question; why wouldn't students take the 'what do you think" part of the task seriously?
How does the student engage with the text?
Textually, tactical readers demonstrate a local engagement with the text--keying on one or more aspects of the story without appearing to process its unfolding wordings carefully. Their orientation to text structure is atomistic and less coherent, qua narrative, than responses in the upper ranges. A tactical reading tends to shift from one starting point to another and this is evident in patterns of choice for starting point in each clause,--what Halliday calls Theme:</p> <pre> As a general guide, the Theme can be identified as that element which comes first in the clause ... The Theme is the starting point for the message; it is the ground from which the clause is taking off. So part of the meaning of any clause lies in which element is chosen as its Theme. (Halliday, 1994, p. 38) </pre> <p>Theme choices over a sequence of clauses often form patterns that display the text's method of development (Halliday, 1994, p. 61). Method of development gives us a snapshot of what readers attend to in the text and their 'rhetorical angle on' the task itself. Each subject Theme in the following excerpt from the tactical reading example is highlighted in bold:</p> <pre>
But I think the story was not about the spider because it was killed straight away. The main thing that caught my attention was
when Mrs Burnett asked about the toy horse and told him not to
play with toys. That was the most confusing part of the story when it doesn't say why she acted like that. So there must have been something with those toys that he was playing with. </pre> <p>The rhetoric of the tactical reading is marked by thematic slippage--a shifting orientation to the task which might be the self ('I'), the text ('the story', 'that' or 'it') or things that impact on the reader's consciousness ('The main thing that caught my attention' and 'there'). In fact, an unstable angle on the interpretive task is a key feature of this kind of reading.
It is not that a tactical reading does not attempt to explain the text; it often does. But responses tend to be 'all over the place', coherence supplied by students' interests and reactions rather than by the narrative itself.
The linguistic features of the mimetic reading
Moderately successful responses (C range texts) display what we can call a mimetic reading of a stimulus text. The term 'mimesis' has been adapted from the writings of Plato to refer to the general capacity of literature to represent reality (Hawthorn, 1992, p. 41). A mimetic reading expects a story to demonstrate fidelity to experience and to teach about life through classic realist narrative techniques (Belsey, 1980/2000)--to make empirical sense, in other words. Interpretive responses of this kind focus on 'what is going on' in a text and tend to retell the story and summarise the import of its events and interactions in pithy generalisations.
Although literary studies courses at university level often problematise popular investments in verisimilitude and truth to experience, they have a stronger hold even on literary communities than many realise. A claim by an author that something actually happened creates a mimetic investment in readers that is hard to break, and a breach of the unspoken contract is regarded as a hoax even in contemporary literary publishing. (3) Popular outrage at such 'hoaxes' points to the strength of the mimetic reading in the literary unconscious, even amongst the cultural elite. However, in examinations, a mimetic reading attracts only a passing or C grade.
How does the student construe experience in/of the text?
Experientially, a mimetic reading views the story as a 'window' on experience. Responses tend to recapitulate events and character interactions in literal and 'realist' ways. In our example, the mother's reaction to the spider is explained in commonsense terms: 'she feared for her son's safety so she burnt the spider along with its large nest of eggs, as she knew they were poisonous'. The response typically retells the events of a story in the same order in which they are narrated in the text. At some point, students will proffer a generalisation about life based on the events. This may take the form of an initial summary about the characters' situation, as in: 'The story is about a mother and her child going to some old ladies house to help her with her gardening'. Statements about the general significance of what happens in the story reveal that students in this range can 'lift out' of the text and extrapolate on events. But generalisations about the message of the story are typically tied to commonsense interpretations of events and, in spite of a preoccupation with 'the order of things', students reconstitute narrative details less adroitly than more successful responses. The synopsis is often awkward.
By what logic does the student generate a response?
The retelling imperative influences the logic of a mimetic reading--the kinds of connections the students make between events. This leads to a tendency to connect messages by means of what Halliday calls enhancement. In this type of expansion, 'one clause expands another by embellishing around it: qualifying it with some circumstantial feature of time, place, cause or condition' (Halliday, 1994, p. 220). Enhancing links are like multiplication signs (x) in mathematics. Rehearsing or going over what happened in the text leads to a reliance on temporal connections, as in:</p> <pre> When the fire had burnt out, (x) the smoke rose and there was a small heap of ashes in it. (x) Then the mother tipped over the tin and scattered its contents with her foot and threw the tin away in the garbage tin. On the other hand, explaining the reasons for a character's actions will lead to greater use of causal or adversative links as well: But in the story, the mother did not
want to burn (or kill) the spider (x) because she knew it was only
protecting her eggs, (x) but the mother had no choice because it
was poisonous. </pre> <p>Reasoning in these responses is heavily tied to syntagmatic structure (sequence) and less attentive to paradigmatic structure (the oppositions and transformations underpinning the deep structure of narrative).
How does the student evaluate the text?
Interpersonally, mimetic readings are tuned into the emotional reactions of characters to what happens and make ethical judgements about the behaviour of different characters. They tend to 'get inside' a positively valued character's head and to co-evaluate things in his or her terms. This is also reflected in the tendency to project an evaluation via the thoughts and feelings of the characters within the text. Whereas the tactical reading prefers projections based on the reader-self, a mimetic reading tunes into the evaluations made by characters within the text. Consider again the following excerpt (projecting words are in bold): 'But in the story, the mother did not want to burn (or kill) the spider because she knew it was only protecting her eggs'. Responses in this range also show a greater ability to draw on quoted material from the story and to make this material relevant to the ongoing interpretation of the text.
In fact, although mimetic readers do attempt appreciation of narrative techniques, the second of the examination questions--How does the writer make it an effective story?--proved a problem for many students (at least in my corpus of responses). The strain is quite tellingly enacted at the end of our mimetic example. Note the dramatic shift into personal voice after what appears to be a valiant effort to identify the techniques that the writer uses to make the story effective:</p> <pre> The writer makes this an effective story by writing some descriptive scenes to make the reader feel in the same position as the character itself. This was achieved by making the text interesting as possible to make the reader feel the suspense and that kept the reader to look forward on what happens next. Also he had a very long description of the house which made it interesting to read on. A stupid story if you ask me!! </pre> <p>This slide into complete candour deconstructs not only the student's 'game', but also the game implicit in the examination itself. The question could be re-framed in the following way: 'This may appear to be an open question which you can read in any way, but you need to read it as a request for a display of literary competence and for a positive reading'. The effort of explaining the techniques used by the writer is all too much for this student, who slips into negative appraisal--almost, one senses, with relief. The register shift is more noticeable because we do not expect mimetic readings to evaluate the text personally (as we noted in tactical readings), but to animate their evaluation through the words or thoughts of characters within the text.
How does the student engage with the text?
Textually, mimetic readers engage with the narrative as a whole, and this meta-awareness is evidenced in their ability to recapitulate and generalise about the story. The response rhetoric is displayed in the tendency to make either the text or the characters thematic. Choices for subject Themes in the mimetic example are in bold, as follows:</p>
<pre> The story is about a mother and her child going to some old ladies house to help her with her gardening. When the mother was in the garden, clearing up the weeds, she saw a spiders' web and a red-back spider in the centre of it. The only thing the mother had to do was kill the spider because it might have killed her and her child, so she thought the only way to get rid of it was to burn it and to burn its eggs as well. </pre> <p>After the first sentence, which introduces the main characters of the story, each finite clause identifies the main character (in subject Theme) and then goes onto to tell us something about her role in the story. This is indeed the method of development in most of the responses in the midrange of achievement. Mimetic readers engage with the text globally, but interpret its 'gaps' in commonsense and empirical terms, focusing on time-space details of the unfolding events. These semantic features define the nature of their participation in the story text.
The linguistic features of the symbolic reading
Highly successful responses (A range texts) demonstrate what we can call a symbolic reading of a stimulus text. A symbolic reading interprets all language choices as if they were in a coherent and motivated relationship to one another and to the author's interests and agendas. In this sense, it moves from a focus on 'text as window' on an external reality to text as a tissue of meanings. For example, in all the high range texts of my corpus, students made connections between surface details of the story, such as the mother's discovery and killing of the red-back spider, and the deeper problematic of the narrative, such as Australian attitudes to migrants. In other words, they attended not just to complicating events (what goes wrong for the characters), but also to their abstract significance (what this means).
In fact, this symbolic orientation to the narrative shaped students' crafting of their response. They tended to use key images in the narrative to organise their own interpretation. Symbolic readers 'borrow' from the symbolic structure of a narrative to generate their response; they do interpretively what the narrative does creatively.
How does the student construe experience in/of the text?
A symbolic reading distils the abstract significance of experiences recreated in a narrative, as in: 'The story is about the way migrants were treated in New South Wales. The boy and his mother were poor and didn't have a very good quality of life. They were unable to live with the boy's father, and his mother had to have more than one job for them to survive.' Unlike mimetic readings, it is not captured by or tied too closely to events and their temporal order in the story, but abstract away from these to focus on the abstract oppositions underpinning events. How does a symbolic reading do this? It relates events and characters (story details) to their abstract significance. In our example, this is achieved through an extended comparison of the existential situation of the mother and her son with that of the spider and her babies. Linguistic resources that create the parallel between concrete image and abstract significance are highlighted in bold.</p> <pre>
The spider is like something foreign and dangerous, just as the
migrants are seen as. The description of the spider laying its eggs
hidden away is a comparison of how the migrants must be. The woman's son is seen as a hindrance, she has to protect him from those who look down on him and accuse him unfairly, like when she
stands up for him when he is found with the horse. This is just
like the spider who hides her eggs for protection. </pre> <p>Despite occasional awkwardness in expression of these parallels, the student effectively re-construes the events of the story by means of the organising symbol of the spider.
By what logic does the student generate a response?
Relating one aspect of the story to another symbolically leads to a preference for elaboration in the logical structure of the interpretation. Halliday defines this type of expansion as a tendency to:</p> <pre>
elaborate on the meaning of another (clause) by further specifying
or describing it. The secondary clause does not introduce a new
element into the picture but rather provides a further characterisation of one that is already there, restating it, clarifying it, refining it, or adding a descriptive attribute or comment. (Halliday, 1994, p. 225) </pre> <p>This elaborating move is more often than not implicit in the way symbolic readers connect messages through further characterisation of a point, but we can supply the equals sign between such messages to bring out this relationship: 'They are treated in the way the spider is; (=) they are seen as if they are poisonous. (=) They are kept outside and the boy is made to put the toy back, like he is poisoning it.' Unlike mimetic readers who replay the syntagmatic features of a story (its unfolding event structure), symbolic readers tune into its paradigmatic features (such as its abstract theme(s) or problematic), and then connect these with surface manifestations in the storyline in their response. Control of elaboration enables symbolic readers to generate related concrete details of narrative semiosis to their abstract significance in a kind of 'This = that' move. This repertoire is not tied to event sequence, but can extrapolate from this to deep, abstract meaning.
How does the student evaluate the text?
Interpersonally, symbolic readers evaluate texts differently from either mimetic or tactical readers. They are attuned to the evaluative positions naturalised by the text as a whole, rather than to identification with specific subject positions enunciated by individual characters within the text. The Red-Back Spider is seen as constructing two competing views about migrants, but resolving these through narrative technique. For example:</p> <pre> The matter-of-fact way in which their lifestyle is described in the first paragraph, without any sign of a want of pity, makes the reader feel for them. The description of the woman speaking to them as if they were 'hard of hearing' makes you feel the patronising attitude with which they are regarded. </pre> <p>Note the competent use of scare quotes here, in which the student integrates quoted material from the story into the flow of argument about the way the text positions its readers to understand the patronising attitude of Mrs Burnett.
Evaluation at this range is 'meta' to the text, while also capturing its emotional nuances more accurately than is the case in mimetic readings, as in:</p> <pre> The boy's mother feels sad and angry because of the way she is treated; but mostly because of the way her son is treated. She probably feels angry because of the lack of opportunities he will have, which she can see by the way he is looked down on and the way he is accused when he is found with the toy. </pre> <p>A symbolic reading takes students beyond simple identification with one or more characters, in this case, into a positive evaluative stance (empathy and discernment) towards the narrative as a whole and its thematic import. There is no hint of a resistant or deconstructive reading in the texts of this range. The evaluative stance is authoritative and compliant.
How does the student engage with the text?
Finally, I comment briefly on the textual dimension of the symbolic reading. Like mimetic readers, students at this level demonstrate a global orientation to the narrative text and this can be discerned in the stable pattern of starting points in the Themes of each clause. We can see this orientation either to the text as a whole (e.g. 'the story') or to the characters it features (e.g. 'The boy and his mother') in the opening paragraphs of our example (subject Themes are in bold).</p>
<pre> The story is about the way migrants were treated in New South Wales. The boy and his mother were poor and didn't have a very good quality of life. They were unable to live with the boy's father, and his mother had to have more than one job for them to survive. His mother had to do domestic jobs. She was a servant, and treated very much like one. The story is really about their treatment and is shown in the spider. The employer creates a barrier between herself and the servant. She treats her as though she were not human, but just an animal. </pre> <p>Like the mimetic readers, A-range students engage with the narrative globally, but a symbolic reading will understand its interpretive 'gaps' metaphorically rather than empirically. In other words, they participate in the text symbolically, something which examiners value very highly.
Given the wealth of analytical detail in my commentary, we can summarise the semantic trends of each reading in summary form. Table 2 outlines the features of the three readings.
Concluding comments
My approach in this paper has been to analyse the distinctive fashions of meaning in tactical, mimetic and symbolic readings using systemic functional tools, albeit in a non-technical way. They have enabled me to highlight some of the deeper patterns of choice in students' different orientations to narrative meaning, and the kinds of rhetorical resources to which they have access in shaping their responses. In this institutional and examination context, some forms of participation in text meanings are more highly valued than others.
A tactical reading speculates on the enigmas presented by a narrative such as The Red-Back Spider, piling up details about the text and reacting subjectively to one or more parts of the text, demonstrating an atomistic (local) orientation to narrative. Participation in the meanings of this narrative is personal, fitful and fragmentary. A mimetic reading focuses on what happens in the narrative and what this means in a general way. Evaluation is tightly linked to characters' feelings and judgements and, although the reading engages with the text as a whole, the orientation tends to be empirical (emerging from a view of text as a 'window on experience'). A symbolic reading tunes into the language of the text and elaborates on the abstract significance of concrete particulars. Evaluation appraises voices and attitudes embodied in the unfolding text, rather than emerging solely from one character's attitudes and beliefs. The response rhetoric reveals a global and symbolic orientation to the narrative.
Taken together with examiners' grades and comments, students' texts provide windows on the literacy (and institutional) practices of the discipline in its examination aspect. We could argue that the conservative force of examinations exert a kind of centripetal pressure on the discipline and these become more obvious in times of expansion and diversification as in the current era of multiple literacies. These expansive energies exert a centrifugal pressure across the curriculum, encouraging teachers to include a greater range of texts and reading practices in classroom literacy work (more is better). However, the openness, diversity and inclusiveness of contemporary curriculum in English is confounded by the relative narrowness, hierarchies and exclusions of examination practices. The resulting tensions make for a confusing situation for many students, and for a duplicity in literacy practices (such that the 'left hand' of the curriculum doesn't know what the 'right hand' of the examination is doing).
Figure 2 depicts relative place of three readings in the hierarchical 'landscape' of examination English.
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
It may appear that my analyses valorise the symbolic reading over the mimetic and tactical readings produced by students. In one sense, this is a fair criticism, in that it does appear that A-range students have access to linguistic resources that they are able to deploy to considerable advantage when it comes to unseen narratives. They are able not only to process and understand the literal and inferred meanings of a text (as in a mimetic reading), but they are also able to abstract away from the text and to use motifs such as the red-back spider to interpret its key oppositions (as in a symbolic reading). Beyond this, they control an interpretive repertoire that is highly valued by teacher-examiners. Their linguistic advantage is compounded by the institutional one.
However, it is also true that I found no examples of sustained critical or deconstructive readings of The Red-Back Spider in my corpus. A critical reading is not sensible for a student in this context. Those students who can make a compliant symbolic reading of a story do so, perhaps because they know that this is the one likely to be valued by teacher-examiners. Furthermore, as I argued earlier, the symbolic reading is the one implicitly sanctioned in the open question. This is not to say that students should not be encouraged to produce critical readings, only that they do not often do so in such contexts.
At the same time as they are a 'trace' of students' reading strategies, these responses are a 'cue' for further work by teachers. The upshot: students need to read the institution as well as the text. But we do have to take the written text seriously--those that students read and those they produce in response to their reading. Furthermore, as the authors of the four resources model made clear over ten years ago: 'What counts as an authorised reading is part of a selective tradition in elementary and secondary classrooms' (Freebody, Luke and Gilbert, 1991, p. 435).
In an examination context, students' assessment fates rest on the texts they produce and the ways in which their readings mesh with those valorised (implicitly or explicitly) by teacher-examiners. In this context, many (students and responses) are called, but few are chosen (for success). In short, only some have access to the selective tradition behind the authorised reading, but the nature of the reading valued is left invisible to students (and perhaps to teachers themselves when they return to their classrooms).
My paper has thrown into relief the distinctive semantic orientations of three different readings and the possibility of making these repertoires more visible to students. There are two aspects to this pedagogic imperative: firstly, teachers themselves need to become aware of which literacy repertoires are valued in examination contexts, especially those that appear 'open'; secondly, they need to alert students to the hierarchies that under-gird the diversities of school English and give them access to a rhetoric for producing valued readings in these contexts. The systemic functional metalanguage I have deployed in my analysis of the tactical, the mimetic and the symbolic readings offers us one 'way in' to this rhetoric.
THE RED-BACK SPIDER
The house in Carp Street was a fibro cottage built on a sloping block of land, the foundations at the back being high enough for a child to stand under and an adult to crouch or sit down.
Except for its weeds, the yard was almost bare, empty of bushes or trees. A few geraniums straggled out of the cracked earth clown one side of the house, under a window. The weeds were dried yellow, brown, and white by the hot summer sun. They grew densely at the back and more sparsely towards the front and down the sides of the house; patches of reddish-orange clay blended in with them. This was the 'gardening' my mother had been employed for. Her task was to clear the yard of weeds and stack them; later, they all had to be burnt. My mother had been recommended by Mrs Hunter, the owner of a farm where she worked as a domestic servant while we lived in a migrant hostel in the central west of New South Wales after our arrival in Australia. My father was living in Sydney and working for the Water Board as a pipe-layer-although he used to come by train once a month, to visit us.
The lady of the house, Mrs Burnett, a widow, was a bony woman whose brown-as-leather skin hung over her frame like a synthetic material and gave her an appearance of being fleshless. She spoke shrilly, bird-like, peering over her glasses as if my mother and I were hard of hearing. Despite her appearance, she did not seem to be very old. As she spoke, she pointed with a crooked finger.
'The gardening implements are under the house. You may stack the weeds over there, in the left corner. They must be burnt when they are dried out. I shall pay you at the end of the day.--Thank you.--Oh yes! The child may stay with you providing he does not become a hindrance.'
With that she hurried away, but at the top of the steps she closed the door slowly, deliberately, with a metallic click, as if to establish the necessary barrier that must exist unspoken between mistress and servant.
According to my mother the work would take two or three days, and these she would slot in between the days she worked for Mrs Hunter, As it was the period before Christmas, school at the hostel was finished and I was allowed to accompany her. We would catch the bus from the camp to the centre of town, then walk among the shops and houses with tiny rural gardens, past the post office, police station, and courthouse, skirt the hospital grounds and walk around the hill with a War Memorial on top, its pale blue light burning all night and into the early hours of the morning. Carp Street lay at the end of this circuit.
On the first day, while my mother worked, I played in the dirt and among the weeds, with two small rectangular blocks of wood that were imaginary cars: making tracks and roads. When the sun became too hot I would go under the house, continuing my game there. My mother wore a broad-brimmed straw hat and made me a cap by tying knots in the four ends of a handkerchief. We drank water from the tap by the back steps next to an outside toilet. We had our sandwiches for lunch under the house together in the cool.
There were boxes and cases under the house, some nailed and some shut; and when my mother returned to work after lunch, I found an open one. Inside, to my surprise, were toy animals of all kinds: sheep, cows, horses, pigs. There were soldiers too--standing at attention, firing rifles, attacking, charging with bayonets. Magically, as if in a dream, they became part of another dimension, a contrast to the world outside in the dirt and weeds. At last I had some real toys!
In the shade, under the floorboards, a new world of experience opened up to me that afternoon, as I made an imaginary farm and invented a war that my soldiers fought to the death to win. Talking to myself, giving orders and calling to animals, I became totally immersed in my games.
Then, at one point, as I galloped a brown horse through a scattering of weeds, there was a cry from my mother and I rushed over to the side fence where she was kneeling. 'Zarazliwy!' she cried.
The word meant 'poisonous' and I recoiled instantly. Under a beam of the paling fence where the spade could not reach, between a small rusty tin and the ground, was a spider's web. Hung in its centre, like a black pearl, was a red-back spider, glistening in the sun, the red stripe on its back even more brilliant than the glossy black dome. Its front legs were raised, slender and fine, like a dancer's.
My mother held up a hand in caution. 'Uwazaj' she warned. Be careful.
With a stick she started to extract the spider awkwardly from its sticky web, but in the blink of an eye it scurried into the tin, its slim legs becoming a blur of movement.
Turning over the tin, my mother indicated the egg sacs of yellow-brown silk. 'Inside are its eggs', she said. 'Hundreds of them.' Peering over her shoulder I wondered why the spider had to hide its eggs like that, in a rusty tin under the fence among the weeds. What was wrong with laying them out in the sunlight, where they could warm more easily? Birds made their nests out in the open, in the trees; a butterfly spun its chrysalis and left it on a branch. Was it because it was poisonous, or was there something evil in its nature that it had to hide?
Without speaking my mother prodded the inside of the tin with a stick.
'Did you kill it?' I asked.
'I don't know, but we must make sure. It is a poisonous kind.'
She dropped dry weeds into the tin and pushed them in with a stick. Taking a box of matches from the pocket of her apron she dropped a lit match into the tin.
A tongue of fire rose up; wispy smoke curled in its wake, slowly becoming thicker.
Where is the spider? I thought. Why doesn't it come running out?
'What is the matter?'
It was Mrs Burnett; she stood behind us, her eyes straining in the sunlight, peering at us as if we had green skin.
'Spider', my mother replied. 'Black--with red on back.'
'Oh, I see--Very well, you may continue.'
Turning around, I stepped back to look at her.
'What is that you have, boy--in your shirt pocket?'
It was the galloping brown horse I was playing with when my mother called out. I must have put it into my pocket.
My mother stood up, wiping the sweat from her eyes.
'He not take the horse ... He only put it in pocket.' She took out the horse and handed it to Mrs Burnett.
'You found the suitcase, I see. Please return all the toys and do not play with them.'
She took the horse and clasped it in her hand like it was a precious stone; then she returned to the house, went up the steps and clicked the door behind her like she had done that morning.
In the last few moments I had forgotten the spider; suddenly, I remembered. 'The spider! The spider!' At our feet the fire had gone out; smoke rose from the tin and its contents were a small heap of ashes, barely distinguishable from the blackened interior.
We both knelt down on the hot earth.
'There is no more spider', my mother said. She tipped over the tin and scattered its contents with her foot. Then she picked up the tin on the end of the stick and carried it over to the garbage bin next to the toilet. It fell in with a clunk and she dropped the lid with a clatter, as if she did not care whether it made a noise or not.
She began to talk about something different, something that had nothing to do at all with the events of a few minutes earlier But I could tell she was upset, that she was only pretending, distracting herself so as not to become upset. She was sad, I could tell that by the tone of her voice. Although I could not bring myself to ask why, I knew it was nothing to do with the spider.
Based on a story by Peter Skryznecki
Reference Test Question
Although the story is called The Red-Back Spider it ends with the words '... I knew it was nothing to do with the spider'.
What do you think the story is about?
How does the writer make it an effective story?
Tactical reading example
The effective part of the story to me was at the beginning when it explained what they were doing there in that point of time. To me it had a few things the story was about. How the father is away from his wife and son and telling us how the wife is surviving with her son and then is goes near the end of the story how Mrs Burnett reacted when she saw the horse in the pocket and it sounded like she didn't care if they got hurt She only cared about her work being done because in the story when the mother told her about the spider she just said 'Oh I see ... Very well you may continue.'
But I think the story was not about the spider because it was killed straight away. The main thing that caught my attention was when Mrs Burnett asked about the toy horse and told him not to play with toys. That was the most confusing part of the story when it doesn't say why she acted like that. So there must have been something with those toys that he was playing with.
GRADE D+ 6
Mimetic reading example
The story is about a mother and her child going to some old ladies house to help her with her gardening. When the mother was in the garden, clearing up the weeds, she saw a spiders' web and a red-back spider in the centre of it. The only thing the mother had to do was kill the spider because it might have killed her and her child, so she thought the only way to get rid of it was to burn it and to burn its eggs as well. She did this by putting some weeds in the tin (where the spider hid its eggs and the red-back spider was in it too), using a stick and push the weeds down, she dropped a lit match and suddenly the fire became bigger and bigger with its wispy smoke becoming thicker and thicker.
When the fire had burnt out, the smoke rose and there was a small heap of ashes in it. Then the mother tipped over the tin and scattered its contents with her foot and threw the tin away in the garbage tin. But in the story, the mother did not want to burn (or kill) the spider because she knew it was only protecting her eggs, but the mother had no choice because it was poisonous and that she would have done the same to protect her own child.
The writer makes this an effective story by writing some descriptive scenes to make the reader feel in the same position as the character itself. This was achieved by making the text interesting as possible to make the reader feel the suspense and that kept the reader to look forward on what happens next. Also he had a very long description of the house which made it interesting to read on.
A stupid story if you ask me!!
C8
Symbolic reading example
The story is about the way migrants were treated in New South Wales. The boy and his mother were poor and didn't have a very good quality of life. They were unable to live with the boy's father, and his mother had to have more than one job for them to survive.
His mother had to do domestic jobs. She was a servant, and treated very much like one. The story is really about their treatment and is shown in the spider. The employer creates a barrier between herself and the servant. She treats her as though she were not human, but just an animal. The boy is not treated as any other child would be, he is outcasted; just barely tolerated by being allowed to stay. He is made to leave the toys alone, as though just by touching them, he is poisoning them.
The story is about the conditions they are living in. The conditions are poor. They are not even invited to eat inside. They eat outside under the house. Because they are foreign, they are not treated as humans. The story is also about their feelings. They boy's mother feels sad and angry because of the way she is treated; but mostly because of the way her son is treated. She probably feels angry because of the lack of opportunities he will have, which she can see by the way he is looked down on and the way he is accused when he is found with the toy.
The story is made effective because of the spider. The spider is like a comparison of the boy and his mother. They are treated in the way the spider is; they are seen as if they are poisonous. They are kept outside and the boy is made to put the toy back, like he is poisoning it.
The spider is like something foreign and dangerous, just as the migrants are seen as. The description of the spider laying its eggs hidden away is a comparison of how the migrants must be. The woman's son is seen as a hindrance, she has to protect him from those who look down on him and accuse him unfairly, like when she stands up for him when he is found with the horse. This is just like the spider who hides her eggs for protection. The woman knows that her son cannot grow up the same as other children because he will be treated like an animal; like a poisonous spider.
The spider is killed to symbolise the way that the migrants cannot win. Just as the spider doesn't come running out when the match is lit in the tin, the people are unable to escape the treatment; they just have to take it. They see no way out.
The descriptions make the story effective. The matter-of-fact way in which their lifestyle is described in the first paragraph, without any sign of a want of pity, makes the reader feel for them. The description of the woman speaking to them as if they were 'hard of hearing' makes you feel the patronising attitude with which they are regarded. The use of the word 'hindrance' and the way the employer speaks to them makes the reader feel for the way they are treated.
When the boy asks the question, 'Was it because it was poisonous, or was there something evil in its nature that it had to hide?', the reader is made to think that the spider only hides for protection, and this is not because of anything wrong with the spider. The spider is the victim. The migrants are also the victims, made to hide away, which also can be shown in sitting under the house and behind purposely closed doors. They are seen as like poisonous spiders, and the innocence of the boy and the feelings of the mother appeal to the reader and make the story very effective.
GRADE A+ 15
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the New South Wales Board of Studies, which made the responses available and gave permission for reproduction of the narrative and response texts in the course of my research.
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Notes
(1) The author, Peter Skryznecki, complained to the New South Wales Board of Studies about its changes to his original text. The ending of his story makes it clear that Mrs Burnett's negative attitude to the boy's playing with the toy soldiers was a result of losing her own son in a war.
(2) Infelicities of spelling or expression are retained, as in the original these are what the examiners encountered and responded to.
(3) A recent example of the strength of investment in 'realist truth' is the outrage in literary circles over the alleged fabrication by Norma Khouri of factual details of her involvement as a witness of 'honour killing' in her book called Forbidden Love. Table 1. Probe questions related to each metafunction Metafunction Probe question Ideational (experiential) How does the student construe 'experience' in/of the text. Ideational (logical) By what logic does the student generate a response to the text? Interpersonal How does the student evaluate the text? Textual How does the student engage with the text and how is this displayed in the response rhetoric? Table 2. Different patterns of linguistic choice in three readings. Metafunctional Tactical reading Mimetic reading Symbolic reading Probe (Low-range texts) (C range texts) (A range texts) Experiential The text is The text is a The text is a How does the enigmatic. The 'window' on tissue of student student focuses experience. The meanings. The construe on idiosyncratic student focuses student focuses experience particulars of on what happens on the abstract in/of the the story and/or in the story significance of text? its characters. and its general the story. significance. Logical The student The student The student By what logic generates a generates a generates a does the response that response that response that student aggregates or rehearses elaborates on generate a accumulates events and text response? detail. significance. significance. Interpersonal The student The student The student How does the reacts summarises appraises student subjectively to characters' voices and evaluate the once or more feeling and attitudes text? parts of the viewpoints. embodied in the text. text as a whole. Textual The student The student The student How does the engages with engages with engages with student engage local features of the text as a the text as a with the text the text. The whole. The tissue of & how is this response rhetoric response meaningful revealed in reveals slippage rhetoric relations. The the response and an atomistic reveals a response rhetoric? orientation. global & rhetoric empirical reveals a orientation. global & symbolic orientation. Figure 1. Semantic options for generating a response to narrative. How does the student construe Speculate on the text & identify experience in/of the text? some key figures/ events Retell the story and generalise about its message Interpret the abstract significance of the text symbolically Generate a response that aggregates details about the text By what logic does the student Generate a response that rehearses generate a response? events in the text Generate a response that elaborates on text significance React subjectively to one or more parts of the text How does the student evaluate Summarise characters' feelings and the text? viewpoints Appraise voices and attitudes embodied in the text as a whole Engage with local aspects of text (atomistic) How does the student engage with Engage with local aspects of text the text? (empirical) Engage with global features of text (symbolic)
