This 3-page essay is of high-level and discusses key CLA terminology as well as a thorough analysis on the feature of the adjacent text - which may be found online as part of a past paper.
The text displays a narrative comic book story written to inform the audience about a
fictional character named ‘Thor’, that follows the conventions of a fantasy adventure genre.
The fundamental concepts of the story are clear and understandable for the readers to
comprehend. It can be inferred that the child is writing for a job related purpose which could
be identified as a school task with teacher supervision. Additionally, the child’s previous
knowledge of Greek mythology, ‘Thor’, suggests that there has been earlier pre-teaching
involved, enabling the child to scaffold his knowledge into a story and reapplying this
creatively. On the other hand, this might explain the reason for the systematic structure of the
strip. That includes numbered boxes of equal sizes. However, in terms of creativity, the
comic strip might have also been constructed as a process of stimulation. In which, the child
composed a creative print in order to provoke thoughts and ideas. It is well-known that
current education systems value accuracy in the teaching of explicit meta-language to
Primary school students; indeed, the National Curriculum of England even tests explicit
grammar teaching in schools. However, grammatical, punctuation, lexical and spelling
accuracy is not always valued over the importance of allowing creative approaches to writing.
Grainger, Goouch and Lambirth (2005) in Creativity and Writing Development Voice and
Verve in the classroom – demonstrated their concerns that accuracy was being valued more
than creativity and the purposes of writing. Ultimately schools do tend to follow a more
genre-based model to teaching writing in which explicit teaching is scaffolded contextually,
structured towards independent writing of specific genres. It is undeniable that most curricula
value accuracy in writing skills. Therefore, accuracy is important, as is creativity – but the
two should not exist exclusively in teaching writing to children.
Lexically, the register is appropriate for the narrative; ‘Thor visits the land of Giants’.
Evidence of this can be identified when the child introduces the story in box 1 with the
collocation of the two words; ‘One day’. This traditional opening to a fairy-tale has
connotations of an imaginative piece of writing. Which can be linked into Halliday’s theory
of functions of speech, where the child associates his imagination with fantasy terminology.
Furthermore, the child’s previous schemas of stereotypical fairy-tale themes have reflected on
the narrative, which accommodates the idea that the child has been prompted by a teacher or
parent. As the lexical field of the narrative is genre specific to fantasy. For instance, the child
utilizes words such as ‘Greetings’, which is not a common acknowledgement in regular
speech. In addition, the child uses character names such as ‘Thor’ and ‘Loki’ to insinuate the
theme of legends or perhaps making reference to Greek mythology. This would suggest that
the child has prepared for this topic beforehand, further amplifying the idea that the story has
been an educational orientated task. The child is aware that a writing piece is particularly
more formal than speech, consequently there has been no use of contractions or
abbreviations. In relation to Jean Piaget this child could be within the concrete operational
stage, as they are becoming capable of logical expression through language, although there
are abstract ideas present. Ideas are formulated cohesively, which can be seen to be done
appropriately through the use of discourse markers. ‘Next’, this enables the tale to illustrate a
suitable sequence. Likewise, the use of time prepositions is also relevant, ‘The next morning’,
this exhibits the child’s understanding of time and the importance of chronological orders in
story writing. However, short sentences such as ‘Thor and some of his friends’, can be
considered to be similar to speech due to how vague and unspecific the child describes Thor’s
friends, as though the audience are already familiar with the nameless characters. Although
the child gives an ambiguous description of Thor’s friends, he does inform the audience with
other details of additional individuals. ‘Enormous cat’, this adjective is unusual to depict the
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