English Year 10: Language for Empowerment
learning-sequence | English | Year Level(s): 10
Explore the power of writing.
Overview
Students analyse a ‘manifesto’ about the value of writing for a minority group – deaf people – to identify the author’s strategies for appealing to shared cultural knowledge, values and beliefs, and the experience of marginalization.
Students then analyse 2-3 historical texts for examples of language that includes or marginalizes deaf people.
Outcomes
Understand the ways language can include and exclude using alignment, pronouns, shared references and shared cultural knowledge.
Suggested Activities
Language for Empowerment
Students analyse a text to identify how it uses language with the aim of involving and empowering people.
Sources
‘Why Deaf People Must Write’ by Karen Lloyd (1980s)
Outcomes:
Students understand how language can have inclusive and exclusive social effects, and can empower or disempower people
Key Concepts/Vocabulary:
Language used to align the reader or indicate shared assumptions.
How Language Can Include or Marginalise People
Students compare texts to identify how they use language to include or marginalise people.
Sources
‘Why Deaf People Must Write’ by Karen Lloyd (1980s)
Letter to the Editor by Eli Noble (1950)
Public letter to members of the Australian Association for the Advancement of the Deaf by M. O. Wilson (1930s)
‘Deaf and Dumb Land’ by Ernest Abraham (early 1900s)
Other old texts written by deaf people, as appropriate
