english ATAR year 11

Command word

A command word in a question indicates the type of answer required.

Critical word

A word in a question that you must expand upon. For example if the critical word is 'perspective' you must say what the perspective is.

Concept word

A word within a question that indicates curriculum content.

Condition word

A word within a question that indicates the condition of the answer. For example, 'texts' means you must discuss more than one text.

Historical Context

The setting and circumstances in which a literary work is written or read. Or the historical period that shapes a work of literature.

Social Context

The social environments, including economic and cultural conditions, that influence people's lives at the time and place the text is read or understood.

Personal context

The situation, background and traits of an individual and their environment that may effect the writing or understanding of a text.

Cultural context

The values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in society at the time and place of writing or comprehending the text.

Perspective

one way of looking at things, based on someone's personal context.

Point of view

the perspective from which a story is told - first, second or third person point of view.

Value

what a person deems important in life

Attitude

feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.

Ideas

economic, political, religious, or social viewpoints that can be expressed as statements.

Pathos

Appeal to emotion

Logos

Appeal to logic

Ethos

Ethical appeal (credibility)

Kairos

Appeal to a sense of urgency

Language features

The features of language that support meaning (for example, sentence structure, punctuation, framing, camera angles).

Conventions

Accepted rules of written and spoken language, forms and modes.

Stylistic choices/devices/features

A general term referring to diction, syntax, tone, figurative language, and all other elements that contribute to the "style" or manner of a text.

Prose

written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure.

Poem

a piece of writing that usually has figurative language and that is written in separate lines that often have a repeated rhythm and sometimes rhyme

Audience

The group of readers, listeners or viewers that the author is addressing e.g. students in the classroom, an individual, the wider community, review writers, critics and the implied audience.

Context

The environment in which a text is responded to or created. Context can include the general social, historical and cultural conditions.

Figurative language

Word groups/phrases used in a way that differs from the expected or everyday usage. They are used in a non-literal way for particular effect.

Form

The shape and structure of texts. Literary texts, such as novels, poetry, short stories, plays, fiction, multimodal texts, and non-fiction.

Genre

The categories into which texts are grouped by subject and conventions.

Hybrid Texts

Composite texts resulting from a mixing of elements from different sources or genres.

Idiom

A group of (more or less) fixed words having a meaning not deducible from the individual words.

Interpretation / Reading

The process of making meaning of text. This process draws on a repertoire of social, cultural and cognitive resources.

Alternative readings

readings that focus on the gaps and silences in texts to create meanings that vary from those meanings that seem to be foregrounded by the text.

Dominant reading

is the reading that seems to be, for the majority of people in society.

Representation

Representation refers to the way people, events, issues or subjects are presented in a text. The term implies that texts are not mirrors of the real world. but constructions.

Rhetoric

The language of argument, using persuasive and forceful language

Rhetorical devices

Language techniques used in argument to persuade audiences (for example, rhetorical questions, repetition, propositions, figurative language).

Issues

Matters of personal or public concern that are in dispute; things which directly or indirectly affect a person or members of a society and are considered to be problems.

Medium

The means or channel of communication such as the spoken word, print, graphics, electronic/digital forms.

Metalanguage

Language used to discuss language (for example: mise-en-scène and symbolism, or clause, and conjunction).

Mode

The various processes of communication: listening, speaking, reading/viewing and writing/creating.

Mood

The atmosphere or feeling in a particular text. For example, a text might create a sombre, reflective, exhilarating or menacing mood or atmosphere depending on the imagery or other language used.

Multimodal texts

Combination of two or more communication modes (for example, print, image and spoken text, as in film or computer presentations).

Narrative point of view

The ways in which a narrator may be related to the story. For example, the narrator might take the role of first or third person, omniscient or restricted in knowledge of events, reliable or unreliable in interpreting what happens.

Personification

The description of an inanimate object as though it were a person or living thing.

Text Structure

The ways in which information is organised in different types of texts (for example, chapter headings, subheadings, tables of contents, indexes and glossaries, concluding paragraphs, sequencing, topic sentences, taxonomies, cause and effect).

Theme

An idea, concern or argument developed in a text; a recurring element (for example, the subject of a text may be love, and its theme could be how love involves sacrifice). A work may have more than one theme.

Tone

Tone describes the way the 'voice' is delivered. For example, the tone of a voice or the tone in a passage of writing could be friendly or angry or persuasive.

Analytical texts

Texts whose primary purpose is to identify, examine and draw conclusions about the elements or components that make up other texts. Analytical texts develop an argument or consider or advance an interpretation.

Imaginative texts

Texts whose primary purpose is to entertain or provoke thought through their imaginative use of literary elements. They are recognised for their form, style and artistic or aesthetic value.

Interpretive texts

Texts whose primary purpose is to explain and interpret personalities, events, ideas, representations or concepts. They include autobiography, biography, feature articles, documentary, satire and allegory.

Persuasive texts

Texts whose primary purpose is to put forward a viewpoint and persuade a reader, viewer or listener. They form a significant part of modern communication in both print and digital environments.

Visual elements

Visual components of a text such as composition, framing, representation of action or reaction, shot size, social distance and camera angle.

Voice

Voice, in a literary sense, is the distinct personality of a piece of writing. Voice can be created through the use of syntax, punctuation, vocabulary choices, persona and dialogue.

Anaphora

the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses

Parallel sentence structure

sentence arrangement in which each sentence follows the order of the first, and the sentences sound as much alike as possible

Foreshadowing

A narrative device that hints at coming events; often builds suspense or anxiety in the reader.

Anthropomorphism

the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, animal, or object.

Paradox

A statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.

Metaphor

a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

Simile

A comparison using "like" or "as"

Symbolism

A device in literature where an object represents an idea.

Motiff

A reoccurring subject, theme, idea, in a literary work.

Onomatopoeia

A word that imitates the sound it represents.

Irony

the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

Sarcasm

the use of irony to mock or convey contempt

Parataxis

writing successive independent clauses, with coordinating conjunctions, or no conjunctions

Allusion

A reference to another work of literature, person, or event

Cacophony

A harsh, discordant mixture of sounds

Tautology

needless repetition of an idea by using different but equivalent words; a redundancy

Parallelism

Phrases or sentences of a similar construction/meaning placed side by side, balancing each other

Characterisation

the creation or construction of a fictional character.

Exposition

A narrative device, often used at the beginning of a work that provides necessary background information about the characters and their circumstances. Telling, rather than showing.

Apostrophe

A figure of speech that directly addresses an absent or imaginary person or a personified abstraction, such as liberty or love.

Cliche

a worn-out idea or overused expression

Enjambment

A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next.

Connotation

an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.

Denotation

The dictionary definition of a word

Ballad

A poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas

meter

A regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry

Chronological order

(Time Order) Events are arranged in the order in which they happened

Rhetorical question

A question asked merely for rhetorical effect and not requiring an answer

Inclusive language

Words that include the audience in the topic being argued/discussed using the words we, us, etc.

Exclusive language

Excluding a person or group, often creating an 'us and them' mentality.

Syntax

Sentence structure

Lexical choice

word choice

Purpose

The writer's reason for a text. For example, they wrote a text to entertain/educate readers.

Response

Reaction to a text

Technical codes

The ways in which equipment is used to tell a story in a media text. For example, cinematography.

Anecdote

A short story about a real person or incident.

Polysyndeton

A literal device that uses multiple repetition of the same conjunction. For example 'She's going Hong Kong and America and Africa and Malaysia and Cuba and Chile.'

Asyndeton

A literal device that omits the use of conjunctions. For example, 'He eats, sleeps, drinks.'

Oxymoron

A figure of speech that combines contradictory words with opposing meanings. For instance, 'old news', 'deafening silence'

Juxtaposition

Placing two or more things side by side often to compare or contrast.

Colloqualism

informal, everyday language

Eye dialect

The use of misspellings to represent regional or dialectal variations.

Selection of detail

Bits of factual information that help the reader understand better.

Zoomorphism

assigning animal qualities to a non-animal subject, like a human being, inanimate object or idea.

Dialogue

the written conversation between two or more characters within a narrative.

Flashback

A flashback interrupts that chronological sequence, the front line action or 'present' line of the story, to show readers a scene that unfolded in the past.

Circular story structure

A narrative story ends where it began.

Diagetic sound

Any sound that characters on screen can hear.