Conceptual Understandings

Audience

Language should be appropriate for the target audience. Whom is the text aimed at? To define your audience, consider the following factors:

  • Social status
  • Income
  • Age group
  • Gender
  • Cultural background
  • Physical location
  • Special interests

Context

It is essential to understand that language should be appropriate to the situation in which one is communicating. The following questions can help you identify the context.

  • What is the historical, social, or cultural context?
  • Formal or informal?
  • Does it consider today’s perspectives or old ones?

Purpose

The intention, goal, or message that wants to be achieved. What do you want to accomplish with the text? Written language, too, has specific purposes. These include:

  • Giving instructions, guidelines, or advice
  • Narrating stories, or events
  • Describing people, places or things
  • Explaining events, mechanisms, or systems
  • Persuading an audience of a point of view

Meaning

How well words are managed to communicate a clear message. Stimulus questions:

 

  • What is the message?
  • Is the meaning clear?
  • How is the text structured?
  • Does it have a sequence?
  • How difficult to understand would it be for my audience?

Variation

To understand that differences exist within a given language and that speakers of a given language can generally understand each other. Stimulus questions

  • How or why does a language change over time, across geographical boundaries, or from one social or cultural group to another?
  • What does it mean to say that aspects of a text are “lost in translation” from one language to another?