Stage 4 reading - Author perspective and bias
Learning intention
Students will learn to identify author perspective in texts. Students will learn to find evidence in the text to understand author perspective.
Syllabus outcome
- EN4-2A: effectively uses a widening range of processes, skills, strategies and knowledge for responding to and composing texts in different media and technologies
National Literacy Learning Progression
Understanding texts
- UnT9: identifies the main themes or concepts in complex texts by synthesising key ideas or information (comprehension); evaluates text features for relevance to purpose and audience (comprehension); analyses texts which have more than one purpose and explains how parts of the text support a particular purpose (comprehension); identifies different interpretations of the text citing evidence from a text (comprehension); uses processes such as predicting, confirming predictions, monitoring, and connecting relevant elements of the text to build or repair meaning (process); identifies language used to create tone or atmosphere (vocabulary)
- UnT10: applies and articulates criteria to evaluate the language structures and features for relevance to purpose and audience (comprehension); evaluates the reasoning and evidence in a persuasive text (comprehension); analyses the author’s perspectives in complex or some highly complex texts (comprehension); integrates automatically a range of processes such as predicting, confirming predictions, monitoring, and connecting relevant elements of the text to build meaning (process)
- UnT11: analyses the credibility and validity of primary and secondary sources (comprehension); identifies subtle contradictions and inconsistencies in texts (process)
NAPLAN item descriptors
The relevant NAPLAN item descriptors are included in the resource, available for download on this page.
Task outline
Full task descriptions are included in the resource, available for download on this page.
Identifying author perspective
Students are introduced to factors contributing to author perspective, including tone, mood, theme and assumptions about the audience.
Author purpose and audience
Students determine the purpose of a range of texts by looking at key features, including text structure, vocabulary and text layout elements. Students investigate the idea of audience assumption in more detail.
Selling to audiences
Students design a product advertisement, focusing on vocabulary, sentence complexity and the selling ‘pitch’ that will best appeal to their audience.
Tone
Students use a range of texts to find evidence to indicate the tone of an author.
Identifying tone in text
Students composes short descriptions of an event to convey a particular tone. Students then identify tone in novel texts, how the tone changes throughout the text and discuss how authors controlling tone to support them to convey their message.
Mood
Students create texts for an assigned tone and mood.
Theme
Students develop a list of topics that are explored in a nominated text and write a responsive sentence about what the author thinks about the topic. Students read or view a range of short texts and identify the tone, mood and central theme.
Bias
Students explore personal bias and the importance of acknowledging bias in texts. Students read a range of news articles and predict which ideas might be included and excluded in the text based on the headline. Students also review statistics and information in the article to identify the author’s perspective.