Thursday, March 27

reflection on unit 3

In unit 3, we are being stressed and focused on positioning. We learned about the idea of positioning in critical literacy. Positioning is the way the writer construct the participants in the text and also the readers.

Since I have been exposed on how to answer the questions in the portfolio task, I found that approaching the text using the skills in the portfolio task is actually an interesting thing to do. In this unit, the practice text and the portfolio task are on two different texts. The practice text in this unit is ‘Please let me go to your school’ and the portfolio task is ‘Truth about youth’.

The information that I found interesting in the text ‘Please let me go to your school’ is the way the writer construct the readers using the photograph and the caption. The photograph of an innocent little girl named Scarlett is shown and the caption is a quotation from Scarlett herself. The readers are positioned as people who will be in Scarlett’s side and sympathized with her.

As for the text ‘The truth about youth’, we did the same portfolio task but there is some additional information that I think I have gained. When we were doing the visual literacy, other than the title and image, we also need to see and guess the implicit meaning of some words. For example, the word ‘Bheard’ and the image of a boy screaming. At first, I have no idea what that word means. Then our lecturer told that it actually means ‘be heard’. The writer is writing the article to make the readers think, understand and also help the youths who have problems, meaning to listen what is in their hearts.

I think that all the areas in this topic have been covered and touched thoroughly and I guess I do not find anything that is problematic to me.

Sunday, March 2

Reflection on unit 2

After we have understood what Critical Literacy is, we came to the inner part of Critical Literacy. On unit 2, we learn about perspective. The practice text for this unit is ‘Battling the bullies’ and the other background readings are ‘Language, perspective, ideology’ and ‘Text and Textualities’.

In this unit, I learned to polish my skills more on the ten areas of approaching text, for example in the text ‘Battling the bullies’. In this unit, the information that I found interesting is that visual literacy is not just the pictures that are showed in the text. The way the title is written, the font size and the color of fonts are also visual literacy. Before this in unit 1, I have misunderstood what visual literacy is where I thought that only pictures can be considered as visual literacy.

I still have problems on writing the perspective. This is not what should be happening because we were stressed on the perspective in this unit. Nevertheless, I tried to read the text over and over again to get the point of the perspective and I have found out that I need to find out what stance is taken in the particular text. What does the writer argues about and whether the writer condemns or commends the participants in the text.

When I read ‘Battling the Bullies’ at the first time, I only covered what the writer writes. I get the gist ideas of the issue that have been brought by the writer but the ideas were only the outer layer of the text. When I approach the text using the 10 areas in the portfolio, I have known the inner of the text, which are the ideas that the writer was trying to put in the middle but require us to think. This made perspective as one of the important areas to be the methodology of approaching a text.

To recap, unit 2 was giving me the idea of what I will cover in unit 3 that is on positioning. I am still trying to understand more on how to write the writer’s perspective and to inspect closely the writer’s stance, whether it is negative or positive.