english@kkc

For this achievement standard you will read a selection of short texts or extracts which you have not previously studied and answer questions about the ideas and language features.

You will be required to:

• Show an understanding of the ideas presented in the text: theme(s), characterisation, setting, context, (political, social, historical) and the positioning of the reader
• Show an understanding of the language features presented in the text: methods or procedures used in crafting and shaping the text, including structure, method of narration, style, literary features and language features
• Answer a range of questions which may require short or extended written responses
• Answer the questions precisely with supporting quotes and examples

To confidently analyse ideas and techniques you will need to know and be able to use the terminology of literary analysis. Revise your glossary of literary terms.

Answering Questions on Unfamiliar Texts

• Learn the correct terms for language features.
• Learn how to recognise these features.
• Read each question carefully: you must be clear about what is being asked.
• Refer to the text to develop your answer
• Do not rush as you may overlook crucial details
• Attempt every question
• Write your answer in full sentences
• Give examples to support any statements you make
• Two part questions require TWO part answers. If you are asked to identify and discuss a language feature, make sure you identify the feature using the correct term, then give an example, and then explain the purpose and effectiveness.
• Reread the question and proof read your answer before you move onto the next question.

Really Useful Resources specialises in publishing NCEA revision guides and distributing many hundreds of other textbooks for the New Zealand secondary school market.

This website has recently been developed to make their NCEA revision guides available to you in online form. The guides are intended for students preparing for NCEA assessments. They include a large number of appropriate questions from previous assessments with suggested answers, as well as an indication of the probable assessment level of each question, i.e. Achievement, Merit, Excellence. The guides for English are available for Levels 1-3.

The company is offering you the opportunity to access these guides for free until the end of the year. If you are interested go here and register.

The Argument is number 8 in List Universe’s 25 Greatest Monty Python stetches of all time.

The idea behind the sketch is that there is a service available that will expose customers to unpleasant experiences for a fee. For example, a customer can pay to be verbally abused or hit on the head with a mallet.
In the sketch Michael Palin pays to have an argument with John Cleese. At fitst Cleese simply gainsays everything that Palin says. This frustrates Palin, who asserts that “an argument’s not the same as contradiction”-(”Simply saying ‘No it isn’t’ isn’t an argument.” “Yes it is!” “No it isn’t!”)-until he realises that Cleese is engaging him in a sort of meta-argument about what constitutes an argument.

After you watch the video have a think about what an argument is.

What is an argument?

There are two types of argument. One is an emotional exchange, where winning is the most important thing. The other type of argument is an attempt to clarify thought. This type can take place between several people with opposing views - where opponents force each other to justify their statements, provide clear examples and other ideas revised on the basis of understanding opposing attitudes-or it can take place as part of the presentations of a single person, who questions and hence clarifies his or her own statements. Therefore at least two views are always present in an argument.

1. What type of argument is being presented in the sketch?
2. Under the conditions set up by the sketch, do you think a‘thinking’ - argument is possible?
3. To what extent is it true to say that, for a thinking argument to take place, the people arguing must not be doing it ‘just for argument’?

Remember for a ‘thinking’ argument to take place you need :

• proof
• persuasion

I have added this animation of Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. The poem has been animated by Jim Clark and read by Alan Mumford. The notes that follow are from Wikipedia and were added to the Youtube entry.

“Dulce et Decorum Est” is a poem written by British poet and World War I soldier Wilfred Owen in 1917, and published posthumously in 1920. Owen’s poem is known for its horrifying imagery and its condemnation of war.

The 28-line poem, which is written in loose iambic pentameter, is narrated by Owen himself. It tells of a group of soldiers in World War I, forced to trudge “through sludge,” though “drunk with fatigue,” marching slowly away from the falling explosive shells behind them. As gas shells begin to fall upon them, the soldiers scramble to put on their gas masks to protect themselves. In the rush, one man clumsily drops his mask, and the narrator sees the man “yelling out and stumbling / and flound’ring like a man in fire or lime”. The image of the man “guttering, choking, drowning” permeates Owen’s thoughts and dreams, forcing him to relive the nightmare again and again.

Owen, in the final stanza enforces that, should readers see what he has seen, they (the government) would cease to send young men to war, all the while instilling visions of glory in their heads. No longer would they tell their children the “Old lie,” so long ago told by the Roman poet Horace: “Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori” (literally, “It is sweet and right/honourable, to die for your country”).

Dedication
Throughout the poem, and particularly strong in the last stanza, there is a running commentary, a letter to Jessie Pope, a civilian propagandist of World War I, who encouraged-”with such high zest”-young men to join the battle, through her poetry, e.g. “Who’s for the game”.

The first draft of the poem, indeed, was dedicated to Pope. A later revision amended this to “a certain Poetess,” though this did not make it into the final publication, either, as Owen apparently decided to address his poem to the larger audience of war supporters in general. In the last stanza, however, the original intention can still be seen in Owen’s bitter, horrific address..

This vocabulary game is educational and fun. For each word that you get right, 10 grains of rice will be donated to the United Nations World Food Programme. And for a word game, it is surprisingly addictive.

FreeRice is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com.

FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

WARNING: This game may make you smarter. It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, exam performance …

We are revising Unfamiliar Texts at the moment and I know some of you have a few queries about terms that you are not sure of. Today I will remind you about figures of speech. I will give you some brief definitions of terms and an example.

Antithesis: balanced contrast for special effect.

e.g. (Alexander Pope describing humans)

“Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all…”

Hyperbole: deliberate exaggeration for dramatic effect.

e.g. (Lady Macbeth, full of remorse for Duncan’s murder)

“Here’s the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

Metaphor: a comparison, without ‘like’ or ‘as’, in which one thing is said to be another.

e.g. (Shakespeare’s description of death)

“That undiscover’d country from whose bourne

No traveller returns…”

Oxymoron: a contradiction in two words, again to catch the reader’s attention.

e.g. (from ‘Romeo and Juliet’)

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

Personification: giving human qualities to non-human things.

e.g. (Shakespeare’s image of dawn)

“But look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad.

Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill.”

Simile: a comparison beginning with ‘like’ or ‘as’.

e.g.(picture of an overweight woman laughing)

“… all the woman heaves

As a great elm with all its mound of leaves

Wallows before the storm…”

A neologism is an invented or artificial word. The purpose of this post is to highlight the areas in which new words have been created by people to fulfil a specific purpose (eg the word ‘laser’ was invented to describe something new). The information below comes from the BBC site h2g2, go there to read the full article.

Invented Words in Science

When scientists invent or discover something new, it requires a name or some other way of referring to it. Sometimes it is named after the inventor or discoverer, like Murphy’s Law, and sometimes this leads to a new word entering the language, like ‘diesel’ for the engine invented by Rudolf Diesel and the fuel it runs on. At other times a new word is used that finds its way into everyday language (or is at least recognised by nearly everyone). A good example of this is the word laser, which is an acronym of Light Amplification through the Stimulated Emission of Radiation and was coined in 1959 by Gordon Gould¹ based on the acronym ‘maser’². Similarly, ‘radar’ stands for ‘RAdio Detection And Ranging and was coined by US Navy researchers in 1942. New words in science are often based on existing words, especially Latin and Greek ones, like the term invented by Marie and Pierre Curie for the newly discovered phenomenon ‘radioactivity’ which shares a Latin root with the name ‘radium’ for one of the radioactive elements. (And after the potential of radioactivity was fully realised by the wider scientific community, Marie had a element named in her honour, ‘Curium’.)

Invented Words That Replace Swear Words

In order for literature/TV/Film to become more widely available and achieve better sales, writers often coin new words that replace swear words. This practice is most common in science fiction, fantasy and comedy genres, as the suspension of belief is naturally greater. This list is just a short rundown of the most common:

• ‘Fug’ - American author Norman Mailer used this word in The Naked and the Dead as a euphemism for the f-word.
• ‘Frell’ - Characters in the SF series ‘Farscape’ use this word in times of stress. Most believe this is yet another allusion to the f-word.
• ‘Smeg’ - The writer Grant Naylor created the word smeg (along with goit and gimboid) for his TV sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf. The word didn’t mean anything in particular, it was just a general expletive. Little did they know that smeg was also the name of a fridge manufacturer and its closeness to the word ’smegma’ has led some to believe that it is a contraction of that word.
• ‘Naff’ - The TV sitcom Porridge used the word ‘naff’ (usually when saying ‘naff off’) as a general expletive.

Literary Figures that Invented Words

The master of the made-up word is Lewis Carroll. His poem ‘Jabberwocky’ is full of them. ‘Chortle’ is one word from this poem that has made the jump to everyday English. Note that Jabberwocky appears in his famous novel Alice Through the Looking Glass (The sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).

Due to the amount of time between now and when he was writing, few people realise that Shakespeare made up a lot of words that we use today. There are far too many to name individually, so if you want to find out more read Shakespeare’s Coined Words.

Science fiction and fantasy authors invent lots of words, and some of these words enter our everday language, some enter the common vocabulary of such authors, and some are only used by the one author and possibly the fans.

JRR Tolkien came up with the race and name hobbit and invented many words to describe the different aspects of his Middle Earth. As a linguist who used to make up new languages as a hobby, his invented words can be enjoyed on several levels, often belonging in a specific language and having an (invented) etymology.

Acronymic words are of course popular in SF and author Larry Niven uses ‘tanj’ as futuristic expletive in his ‘Known Space’ stories (eg Ringworld). He explains ‘tanj’ as being a abbreviation of the phrase ‘there ain’t no justice’.

And yes, before you say it, one Douglas Adams, who wrote a radio series/book/tv series about Arthur Dent’s travels through space and time also invented some words, such as hooloovoo (a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue) and frood (a cool person).