Page 116 - The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 11 and 12: English, 2007 (Revised)

Teacher prompts: “What can you infer about a college from the courses listed in its calendar or from its promotional materials?” “What can you infer about this CD from the tone and focus of the liner notes?”
Extending Understanding of Texts
1.5 extend understanding of texts, including increasingly complex or difficult texts, by making appropriate and increasingly rich connections between the ideas in them and personal knowledge, experience, and insights; other texts; and the world around them (e.g., compare their own values to those of an Olympic athlete profiled in a magazine article; compare their own food choices with those recommended in Canada’s Food Guide; verify the credibility of descriptions of the environment in a futuristic novel by reading current articles about the likely effects of global warming)
Teacher prompts: “How has your understand- ing of this essay been affected by reading another article on the topic?” “Do you think the understanding of problem solving that you’ve gained from studying math helped you understand the ideas in this fictional text about a math competition?”
Analysing Texts
1.6 analyse texts in terms of the information, ideas, issues, and themes they explore, exam- ining how various aspects of the texts con- tribute to the presentation or development of these elements (e.g., describe how tone and word choice support the argument in a journal article on a current issue; explain the role of var- ious characters in a short story with respect to plot development and theme; analyse how the use of multiple points of view in a novel con- tributes to the development of its themes)
Teacher prompts: “Do you think this character’s role is to create complications for the other characters, to represent a particular viewpoint, or to act as a mouthpiece for the author’s viewpoint?” “How does the play’s structure contribute to building suspense?“ “How do the tone and choice of words influence your response to the argument?”
Evaluating Texts
1.7 evaluate the effectiveness of texts, including increasingly complex or difficult texts, using evidence from the text effectively to support their opinions (e.g., read and navigate through the home pages of two websites and explain what makes one more user-friendly and
informative than the other; evaluate the effec- tiveness of arguments in a persuasive essay)
Teacher prompts: “How do the layout, the use of colour, and the font choices affect the read- ability of this website? Are the headings informative and the links useful? Does the text provide sufficient information and expla- nation, and is it clearly written?” ”Which letter to the editor in today’s paper was
the most persuasive? What accounts for its effectiveness?”
Critical Literacy
1.8 identify and analyse the perspectives and/or biases evident in texts, including increasingly complex or difficult texts, commenting with growing understanding on any questions they may raise about beliefs, values, identity, and power (e.g., identify gender or cultural bias in job advertisements; determine whether the voices represented in a text are appropriate for that text, and suggest how the meaning would change if different voices were represented; identify a trend in popular fiction and describe what this trend reveals about current society; identify the use of exclusive language in texts)
Teacher prompts: “Does this text make an assumption about the gender of its readers? Is it directed primarily to male or female readers?” “What happens when the charac- ters in this text don’t behave according to cultural norms and stereotypes?” “Do you think the author agrees with or is critical of the social controls that are evident in this story? What makes you think so?”
2. UnderstandingFormandStyle
By the end of this course, students will:
Text Forms
2.1 identify a variety of characteristics of informa- tional, literary, and graphic text forms and explain how they help communicate meaning (e.g., a standard organization and format are used to communicate course information in college calendars; dialogue is used to reveal character
in short stories and novels; photographs, statistics, and pull quotes highlight interesting details in magazine articles; several types of organizational patterns, including question-and-answer and cause-and-effect, can be used effectively in a persuasive essay)
READING AND LITERATURE STUDIES
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English
ENG4C