Resource+3

Resource 3
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Description of the resource: ‘The secret world of wombats’ by Jackie French is an information text about wombats, however it uses a variety of other text types throughout the book, such as narrative; relating stories about wombats, procedure, and recount. The book includes a number of images of different types (both narrative and conceptual) which both adds to and complements the text at different places throughout the book. The images are all black and white, but are mostly sketched using similar techniques, though there are some with lower modality, which are more analytically structured to make a concept clearer for the reader.

Relevance to unit outcome: This book is very relevant to the unit outcome. Firstly, the language used is suitable for stage two students, hence would work well for either individual research, or as a modelled reading class text. Also, being about wombats, the content ties in well with the Australian Animals theme being explored in order to achieve the outcome. Most importantly, the text includes many features that are desirable for the PowerPoint information report that students are to create by the end of the unit; including both textual and visual features. As stated above, there are both narrative and conceptual images used in this resource, many of the images are conceptual though, but not all of the conceptual images are structured and analytical. These images are important because they “make them [the children] emotionally identify” with the subject (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 90). However, at the same time, the structured analytical images are also important and their simplicity is essential as “too much life-likeness, too much detail, would distract from their analytical purpose” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 88).

In terms of textual features, the book covers a vast range of information about wombats; both factual information that generally informs the reader of what wombats look like, where they live, what they eat and do as well as practical information and advice about interacting with wombats. The latter, however, although it is interesting information, is perhaps less important for this particular project of creating a multimodal information report as it would be more difficult and time consuming to gather this information about other animals, compared to the typical factual information that is given.

Literacy focus: However, although the textual information in the book is still quite relevant to the unit in providing a resource for content about animals, the literacy focus from this book for the unit (although it could go either way) is not about the text and features of the text, but rather the visual aspect. In more detail, the literacy focus involves exploring the conceptual images; looking at the modality of the images, and whether they are structured (analytically or not) or unstructured. Also, though in less detail, this resource would be used to explore the difference in purpose of narrative versus conceptual images, and why a particular type of image is used at particular times throughout the book.

References:

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: the grammar of visual design. UK: Routledge.