Kristina Love

Department of Language, Literacy and Arts Education, The University of Melbourne, Australia

On-line discussion around literary texts in secondary English

This presentation will explore how one group of senior secondary school students in Australia respond on-line to teacher prompts about a postmodernist narrative. I have analysed various threads of this on-line discussion using the APPRAISAL framework developed by Martin (2000) and White (2002). I will focus in this presentation on a representative on-line discussion thread where students, despite being provided with more post-structuralist texts, and more flexible modes of negotiating meanings around those texts, are still 'trapped in the affective' (Macken-Horarik, 1996) not yet able to take up interpersonal positions which draw on technical, cultural or historical knowledge of text construction either from a linguistic or a literary criticism perspective.

References:

Macken-Horarik, M. (1996) Construing the invisible: specialised literacy practices in junior secondary English. Unpublished Ph.D thesis. The University of Sydney.

Martin, J.R. (2000) Beyond Exchange: APPRAISAL systems in English In Evaluation in Text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse. S. Hunston & G. Thompson (eds) 142-175 Oxford, Oxford University Press.

White, P. (2002) Appraisal: the language of attitudinal evaluation and intersubjective stance. Appraisal website URL: http:

www.grammatics.com/appraisal