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An Arrest is short story written by Ambrose Bierce, a celebrated American writer. It has used all the rules for a short story very effectively and in such a way that the reader "knows" a lot about the characters and the story teller's attitudes without long descriptions and comment.
Activity:
A short story has elements of the poem and the letter. Its "rules" have been "set" since the first short stories began to appear in popular magazines in the nineteenth century.
These rules were developed by Edgar Allan Poe who said that a Short Story should:
What is in a short story? A short story is made up of several aspects. These are:
The whole story is given tone by the way the writer chooses to tell the story. This involves both point of view and style.
Review activity: Read An Arrest.
Choose one of the other stories from the Horror Masters - Short Stores website and use these questions to analyse the story.
Why Does a Writer Write a Short Story?
When a writer creates a short story s/he has several possible purposes available. These can be to:
A short story can have more than one purpose which becomes clear to the reader through the tone and style of writing used by the author, as well as what happens.
Activity: Access short stories from one of these websites:
Note: These sites are essentially web-based libraries or archived publications which means that students should be given a list of Short Story writers they could search for on these sites to access possible stories for this exercise.
Each story has been written with a different purpose in mind. Read at least two of the stories carefully. Decide what the writer's purpose was in writing each story. Discuss your reasons and supporting evidence (quotations from the story or references to incidents, characters, aspects of setting, style, in the story.) with your teacher. Build up a list of purposes on the board.
Note: These urls and text references can be used to develop responses for Independent Research (Achievement Standard 3.7) later in this study.
Use this to help you work out your answers.
When you read a short story you should ask yourself:
The answers to these questions will help you understand the story and the writer's reason for writing it.
The Title: Short Story writers will often "load" the title of the story to direct the reader to a particular reading of the content or to focus on a significant image or symbol within the story. For example: Owen Marshall uses the title "Cabernet Sauvingon with my Brother" to draw attention to the wine as a symbol of friendship, of unity between the narrator and his brother.
In doing a close reading of a short story it is worth while examining the relevance of the title to the action and exchanges that occur in the story. Consider the use of irony, symbolism, allusion and humour in the title as you read the story.
The beginning will introduce you to the important aspects of the story such as the setting or background or characters. In An Arrest the writer uses the ideas he associates with the woods at night, to introduce the feeling of fear and suspense, the things he feels the reader should know about and understand.
Check out what authors think about the importance of beginnings at: How to Open Without a Bang
The way the story is developed allows the writer to create a feeling of suspense, or surprise or tension. S/he can do this by choosing a particular way of telling the story. A simple way is by organising the events as they happen... first this... then this... then this... then that... then this... which led to the end.
Another way is by using a rapid series of scenes that shift from place to place or time to time but are still obviously connected.
Some writers tell the story as though the story-teller is playing the events through his mind. This can create a story that does not seem to have any organisation at all. This is a "free association" story..
The Ending As you read short stories you will realise that the ways writers choose to end the stories will have different effects on you.
Some writers will tie up all the strands of the story so that the reader "sees" all that happens to the characters and can recognise the purpose of the story reasonably easily.
Other writers, like Roald Dahl, will end the story with a twist ending that makes you smile or recoil in disgust.
Another way to end a story is to leave the ends loose so that the reader has to provide the ending based on the clues and hints left by the writer throughout the story. This is a favourite ending for TV programmes like The Bill or Casualty.
ACTIVITY Class activity:
EXTENSION: Find, in the library or on the World Wide Web, examples of stories that use the different types of beginnings and different types of endings. Write the title and author of the story and identify the type of beginning and ending. Provide evidence from the story to support your decision.
Telling the story:
Just as the endings of stories can be different and create different effects on a reader, the writer can also change the way s/he chooses to "tell " the story. This is referred to Point of View.
There are several ways that a story can be told. The writer can decide to become a character in the story and tell of the events as they affect him or her. The character could act as a reporter and comment on the action and the way it affects another character or characters.
The character will refer to him or herself as "I" and those involved with them as "we". This is called First Person Narrative.
Another way is to tell the story with the author sitting outside the action and observing everything that goes on. The author will "know" what will and has happened to all the characters. The author will refer to the characters as he, she, her, him, they, their, them. This is called Eye of God narration.
Stories can be developed so that the writer can "free associate" ideas to spin off events and thoughts to create the story. This technique can be used to tell the story as if the character is thinking. Because the story can go in many directions with the ideas linked by the narrator's thoughts this is called the stream of consciousness narration.
Each method will create a different type of story and cause the reader to react in a different way.
ACTIVITY Look back at the stories you found for the previous activity that use different ways of telling a story. How did you react to the different ways the stories were told? Which way of telling the story held your attention? Why? Discuss your answers with your teacher.
Characters and Point of View: The way the writer chooses to tell the story will also change the way the characters appear. Short stories show the reader a particular side of a person or his or her relationship to another person. If you look at Frank Sargeson's you will see the story is told by the boy as though he was talking to he reader.
Because Sargeson has told the story in the first person we are told nothing about what the boy looked like, what his parents looked like or the sort of place they lived in. The boy does not think that that information is important because he "wants to tell" about his concentration on his birthday and how he sees his parents' reactions to his behaviour.
A story told by a writer as an observer will often give more detail and information because the observer-author "knows" more than the author as a character.
ACTIVITY: Re-read Patricia Grace's Flies (Electric City. Penguin 1987). Is the author an observer or is she a character in the story? How do you know?
When the story is told through the character's thoughts (stream of consciousness) the reader builds up a picture of the character and his/her concerns from the many clues that develop from the way her/his mind flicks from idea to idea.
ACTIVITY: Re-read James Joyce's Eveline.
Who is telling the story? How do you know?
The point of view of this story seems to vary from that of an outsider observing Eveline to an impression that Eveline is "sitting outside herself" observing and analysing her behaviours and decisions. How does James Joyce do this? Offer a reason for the choice of such an ambiguous point of view in this short story.
Some of the most important things a writer must remember are the words that are used and the way the characters speak, as these will create the moods and impressions necessary to impact on the reader.
Sargeson's Boy talks as if he was a twelve year old. He talks about the things a twelve year old might do in the language of a twelve year old. For example: "I didn't say anything. Instead I gave one of my famous sniff in sniffs. It was a case of urgent necessity." "Any how years and years went by and one morning I woke up and found I was twelve years old. It was all too marvellous for words." "I felt like telling her it was only twenty-five minutes, but I somehow thought with my father there I'd better not. But it was only the next day that my father heard me answering my mother back, and oh gee if he didn't lay it on."
Patricia Grace tells the story Flies in the way small children would by using short sentences and concentrating on the sounds, smells and actions that fascinate children. For example: "Lizzie and Nereana had just finished their jobs when Macky came with his fly.
The fly was on a short piece of cotton, which was all Macky had been able to find. "Get some of Aunty's cotton," he said, "and I'll give you some of my flies." He showed them the matchbox with the flies in it.""The dunny seat and floor were still wet and stank of jeyes, and the flies, once disturbed, buzzed and circled and zoomed."
A good writer tries to build the story and its characters by making sure that the language used sounds like it would be used by the people involved in the situation being written about. If it doesn't the characters won't seem real to the reader and the story won't "work."
This means that if your character is a woman about your mother's age she would not normally speak in the same way as a school-aged person. The differences between people of varying ages and backgrounds can be shown in a story by the words they use and the way their sentences are constructed.
While style can create and develop characters it can also develop the mood and atmosphere in the story.
ACTIVITY:
Choose three characters and situations from the lists that follow. For each character write a paragraph using words and sentence constructions that suit the person and the situation you place them in. Discuss your responses with your teacher and class.
What sort of sentences and words were used by the writers of the most realistic paragraphs?
If the reader's attention is to be kept the writer will have more than an exciting or interesting story to tell.
The Writer's Tools: Constructing the character using Adjectives, Verbs and Adverbs
As you read the short stories in this unit you have seen how a writer develops characters by the way the person speaks or acts in a particular situation. These are techniques that develop from the story. At other times the author tells the reader what the character is like through the sorts of words and their functions in the sentence that the writer decides to use these can be adjectives used to describe the person, verbs used to state an action or adverbs used to change the meanings of the verbs. All of these are important tools in the writer's tool-box which you will use when you write your own short stories. While adjectives describe the characters or setting the actions that occur in the story are told through the verbs and adverbs
Editing the Story:Used well, adjectives, verbs and adverbs build an effective story. When they are over used the story can become difficult to read because the action takes too long to happen. A writer will always try to "tighten the writing up" by economising on his or her use of adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Here is an example where the writer has over written the description of the character. The writer could easily edit these four paragraphs into a less "over-written" style which would be more interesting for the reader as well as getting the action moving a lot faster. Here are the opening two paragraphs edited into a less wordy style:
THE GREAT DAYHe was an awkward kid. His eyes squinted from behind tortoiseshell circles, his ears jutted from his head and his hair, cut with a view to economy, a stubble over his moonlike face. He clutched his school cap in his sweaty hand.
You will notice that the editing has reduced the two paragraphs to one while keeping the description, and the writer's attitude to the character, obvious to the reader.
ACTIVITY:Discuss with your teacher the effectiveness of the rewriting. How has the writer's attitude to the character been kept in the rewritten paragraph? What words showed the author's attitude? Try your hand at editing. Rewrite the third and fourth paragraphs of THE GREAT DAY to reduce the over-written style of the writer.
As you edited the paragraphs you would have noticed that you removed many of the adjectives and adverbs that the writer used to fill out the description of the boy and the courtyard. You have seen that the writer could have created a believable scene which still let the reader know how s/he was to "see" the character. The skill in recognising where a writer has "over-written" by using too many adjectives or adverbs is one that every writer must learn. It is harder to do if it is your own writing that you are editing because you want to protect the words you have written. Professional writers will often use an editor to suggest possible rewrites or alterations to the story so that it arouses the reader's interest and keeps them reading. In the next activity you will analyse a short story to discover how the author uses the different elements to create a situation and tell a story.
Keep these notes beside you as you read Eudora Welty's Why I Live at The P.O.. They will act as a prompt as you do the analysis.
THE ELEMENTS OF THE STORY:
Like the novel and the play, the short story has the elements of:
Each element contributes to the overall effect of the story.
As you read and write a short story you should keep the following questions in mind:
Look at your own short short story... how much detail is supplied by the writer? How much is supplied by the reader? A good short story allows the reader to flesh out the details so that the writer can get on with exploring the situation he or she is concerned with.
Check the use of the pronoun... if it is I, me, my, our, we then the author is a character within the story. The story is being told in the first person. If the pronouns are: he, she, it, hers, his, they, them, their the author is outside of the action and observing as if he/she was God. This is known as the Eye of God technique.
Another way of telling a story is as a series of thoughts, each thought block building up an impression or action. The thoughts can be told in a logical order or as they seemingly occur to the character... at random. This is known as the stream of consciousness technique.
English 3.2: Respond critically to written text(s) studied.
The response will be expected to be in essay form which should include an introduction clearly stating the focus and scope of the argument, a range of points supported by accurate and relevant examples and evidence, and a reasoned conclusion. The essay would be expected to show accurate use and control of writing conventions. Students writing about the short story must refer to at least two of sufficient depth and complexity to enable students to respond at a level that will achieve the standard. The texts would be expected to have significant literary merit/worth/qualities - have an established critical reputation or acclaim.
Brainstorm ideas on why people write. Write down all the different types of writing they know, eg. shopping lists, notes, stories, reports etc. Beside each type of writing give a reason for the writing:
Look at the importance of the reader in all types of writing. Discuss and steer the children towards the idea that writing is communication between the author and the reader.
Write a list of favourite authors and books. Ask why do these authors write, eg. to tell stories, communicate, entertain. Ask what do we know about these authors? Can we find out about them and why they write? Would they have good ideas for helping us as "budding authors"?
The following book has many known New Zealand authors and has comments from the authors. Some are too difficult for the children to understand but others give a good insight into why and how they write, eg. Jennifer Beck, Margaret Mahy, Joy Cowley.
Fitzgibbon Tom, with Spiers Barbara (1993) Beneath Southern Skies New Zealand Children's Book Authors and Illustrators. Ashton Scholastic, Auckland
Getting started with journal writing will need the teacher to explain the difference between a diary and a journal (RTF 178KB) . A diary is a record of actions or what they have done. A journal is a record of reactions. A journal is mostly about the student and as such is writing about themselves, their ideas, thoughts, dreams and opinions.
Explain to the students they can write in prose, poetry or occasionally draw illustrations. As long as the journal entry reflects some thoughts or ideas of the writer it can be included.
Allow students ownership of their journal. It is private between them and the teacher. Sometimes they will have written about things they don't want anyone to read, [including the teacher] and the teacher must respect this. Students will label such writing.
Journals are never marked for spelling, punctuation etc. The teacher can comment by responding in some positive or constructive way to the student's writing eg sympathising with their feelings, suggesting other ideas or just commenting on the mood of the writing.
Provide students opportunities to write in their journals. It could be 10 mins of a writing lesson once a week or for a few minutes each day.
Students will be asked to evaluate their journal writing once or twice a term. From their journals they will select a piece of writing to present in their portfolio. This piece of writing will be reshaped so that it can be shared with others.
After discussing the concept of journal writing give each child a prompts (RTF 20KB) . Teacher models journal writing by recording in their own personal journal. Compare it with a pre-written diary entry. Discuss with the students the difference and discuss how well you, as the writer, have conveyed thoughts and ideas. For the first week attempt journal writing every day, with the teacher modeling and monitoring the student's progress. Students may want to share their journal writing with the class.
Over the next few weeks use journal writing when appropriate and allow the children opportunities to write in their journals in their own time. Use journal prompts for students who have difficulties coming up with ideas.
Refer the children to the revise (RTF 23KB) and self_assessment (RTF 390KB) sheet. Model initial reshaping of a journal entry. Talk aloud your thoughts so the children can see how you change your work.
Discuss changing names to protect the identity of people in the piece of writing. Let them see you work through the process changing your ideas and thoughts several times. Establish the idea that a piece of work full of editing changes is what we aim for, at this stage, not a perfect copy.
Allow latitude in presenting the work as the children try out different methods for publishing, eg. shaped pieces, small books, word processed etc.
When the work is published ask the child to fill in the self-evaluation sheet. Stress the importance of evaluating both the journal and the published piece of writing. The first part of the evaluation is asking the child to examine and analyse their journal writing over a period of time. The second is looking at just one piece of published work. The reason for choosing the portfolio piece will have been modelled first by the teacher. This will give the children ideas and help them choose their first piece.
Teacher Linda Chapman
Year
Level
Duration
Achievement Objective Being Assessed
Learning Outcomes
Processes
Supporting Achievement Objective
Select and adapt these learning activities to best meet the needs of your students, and to fit the time available:
Begin by giving the children an exercise book and a notebook. The exercise book becomes their personal journal and the notebook a "writing ideas" book. Explain that these will be used for the duration of the unit and should be kept close for jotting down ideas.
Learning task 1
Learning task 2
Learning task 3
Publication of a piece of poetic writing, selected from journal entry, that has been drafted, reworked, proof read. Share with students, prior to writing, the assessment key indicators.
assessment (RTF 9KB) self_assessment (RTF 390KB) self_evaluation (RTF 250KB) English Exemplar Project: Personal Experience Writing levels 1-5
Teacher Jan Foote
YEAR
LEVEL
DURATION
NCEA Link
Assessment:
Achievement Standard:
Oral Language - English Exemplar Project
See these Assessment Resource Banks resources for assessment activities focusing on speeches for other purposes eg.
It became apparent that the pupils wanted to find more information both for their speeches and about Martin Luther King. However, their information skills were pretty limited and more work needs to be done in this area. Because there is so much information on Martin Luther King on the web, this lends itself to a comparative trash or treasure exercise where different websites are compared for their usefulness.
Ready to Read Phonics Plus books offer teachers an evidenced based approach to “cracking the code” of reading by providing a focus on word recognition skills, including decoding. This supports an explicit, systematic, sequential approach to teaching reading and writing to children in their first year of school.
While the Phonics Plus books have been written to meet the needs of all learners, phonics-based texts such as these are ideal for teaching learners with dyslexia or other reading difficulty, to read. These books have been designed to support children who need extra support to learn to read by:
There will be three releases of books, most of which are at the beginning of the scope and sequence. This will ensure that learners who need more support to learn to read have enough books available in the Kākano | Seed phase. The MoE will evaluate the effectiveness and impact of the Phonics Plus series to identify what works well and what needs improving, including where more books could be added to provide maximum flexibility for all learners ensuring they have access to enough books to learn, practice, and reinforce their skills.
Supporting teachers to meet the needs of all learners.
Inclusive Education: Tiered support model pdf This is a flexible whole-school approach, designed to help you ensure the right levels of support are in place to improve children’s learning outcomes.
Inclusive Education: Understanding dyslexia Find out about dyslexia, what it is, how it affects learning, and the adaptations and modifications you can make to support dyslexic children.
Inclusive Education: Learning the code and literacy acquisition This slideshow provides guidance on supporting dyslexic learners with literacy acquisition. It includes an explanation of phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and the alphabetic principle.
Te Whāriki Online: Supporting bilingual and multilingual learning This section of Te Whāriki Online describes inclusive practices you can use to support children living in bilingual and multilingual households when they transition to school.
Inclusive Education: Understanding how to build fluency Find out how to build fluency (automatic word reading) so that learners can focus on the meaning of texts, instead of trying to work out key words.
Information on literacy acquisition, structured literacy, and the goal of phonics instruction to support teachers' use of the Ready to Read Phonics Plus books.
Literacy is a foundational skill. To be successfully literate, children need to master three key areas of reading and writing: learning the code, making meaning, and thinking critically.
Learning the codeThe ability to decode and encode written language. Students:
Making meaningThe knowledge, strategies, and awareness to gain and convey meaning when reading and writing. Students understand:
Thinking criticallyAnalysing meaning. Students:
The goal of phonics instruction is to help children to learn and be able to use the alphabetic principle. Phonics instruction helps children learn the relationships between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language.
As children learn the predictable relationships between sounds and letters, they are increasingly able to apply these relationships to familiar and unfamiliar words. As they do this, they begin to read with fluency.
Inclusive Education: The simple view of reading and literacy acquisitionFind out how to support learners to “crack the code” and build their language comprehension. This gives information about early literacy acquisition, the simple view of reading, and Scarborough’s Reading Rope.
This page provides a range of professional readings designed to support literacy development.
Guidelines for integrating readymade commercial packages into teaching programmes: An evidence-based approach: These guidelines are based on research published in An evaluation of the use and integration of readymade commercial literacy packages into classroom programmes.
Lifelong Literacy: The Integration of Key Competencies and Reading: This NZCER report details research that explored how the key competencies might be integrated with the teaching of reading in the middle years of primary (years 3–6).
Learning from the Quality Teaching Research and Development Programme (QTR&D) – Findings of the External Evaluation
Thinking About How Language Works: This resource from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) provides teachers with additional information about language that will help them to analyse student responses to Assessment Resource Bank (ARB) items.
Motivating Literacy Learners in Today's World provides insights into a broad spectrum of children's literacy learning. Motivation is the key theme and the authors show how this can be achieved through reading for pleasure; in writing activities at a number of levels; and through oral language development.
Lifelong Literacy: The integration of key competencies and reading: This report presents the findings of a research project which explored how the key competencies described in The New Zealand Curriculum might be integrated with the teaching of reading in the middle years of primary school (years 3–6). The project involved researchers supporting teachers to conceptualise key competencies more deeply and design and implement reading programmes which integrate the competencies.
Should Transliteracy Replace Language Arts? Two viewpoints are shared by Patricia Russac and Jody Lambert. One in favour of the need to move literacy into the technology age to prepare our students for their future, and the other arguing that students must first learn to read and write effectively before they can interact transliterally. Both make very valid points in this five minute read.
Planting Seeds: Embedding critical literacy into your classroom programme, Susan Sandretto, NZCER Press: Literacy once meant reading and writing words on paper. Today’s students need to be able to understand, use and critically analyse many different text types for different purposes in diverse contexts.
Teaching and leadership strategies proven to enhance accelerated progress for priority learners in literacy. Paul Grundy, Lucknow School. Sabbatical report, 2015
If "Daily Five" and "Cafe" reading has the potential to support diversity, connectedness and coherence in a New Zealand integrated curriculum and improve learning outcomes for all. Sue Allomes, Terrace End School. Sabbatical report, 2015
Ways in which the progress of children who are achieving below what is expected of children in their cohort in writing can be accelerated. Andrew Watson, Lumsden School. Sabbatical report 2014
Gerard continues to use these types of lessons when working on writing. The students are becoming increasingly confident giving each other clear and specific feedback related to language features and they are also able to articulate their own specific areas of strength and areas that need improvement.
Video clip: Next step feedback
Student:
One of my strengths for writing, being creative, like, again, create new storylines. Example, here's a sentence I wrote and he liked it:
"Delicious, scrumptious cupcakes – green, yellow, red. One crush of this mouthwatering cupcake and all your miseries vanish."
That was one of my sentences. And yeah, I think he thought it was very interesting.
I need to work on making full sentences like this because I normally just write and keep writing, not knowing that I don't put full stops or commas. Well then... when I realised I have to reread it, and then edit; keep editing until it makes sense.
Our teacher gave us a set task – to try and improve in our writing. So I've come along a word, name, "pursue". I've gone online to look at the dictionary and the thesaurus, and I've come up with the word, "proceed".
I'm trying to decide whether I should use "proceed" more than "pursue". I don't know whether I should use pursue or proceed.
Back to Gerard's class - Learning Inquiry
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