olic College sgents Park ‘Assessment Task 12017 Let’s Get Personal ~ Autobiographical and Persuasive Writing Date Due: Term 1 Week 9 During your first English lesson Name: Component / Weighting English class: Reading 15% English class teacher: Writing 15% Your Assessment Task Reading (preparation in your own time) 1. Attached to this notification are extracts from two autobiographical texts: Text 1: Sally Morgan, My Place Text 2: Roald Dahl, Going Solo 2, Read both texts at home in preparation for the assessment. 3. You MUST make notes on the following: + Which text do you think is better? + Why do you think this text is better? * What language features make it more interesting to read? + Highlight and label the language features that make it effective and interesting, + Allnotes are to be written on the TWO autobiography texts, Exam Date: Term 1, Week 9 (In-Class exam, your first English lesson) Writing (45 minutes) Writing (In class exam) 4, You will write about the text you have judged to be the better text. You may take your highlighted and labelled copy of the text into the assessment task 5. Write a persuasive text in response to this question: Why is this the better autobiographical text? In your answer you must: + use persuasive techniques to convince the reader that you have selected the better text + support your answer with direct quotations from your chosen text. Syllabus Outcomes to be Assessed: ENA1A responds to and composes texts for understanding, interpretation, critical analysis, imaginative expression and pleasure £440 makes effective language choices to creatively shape meaning with accuracy, clarity and coherenc ASC thinks imaginatively, creatively, interpretively and critically about information, ideas and arguments to respond to and compose textsYEAR 7 Reading and Writing Criteria Demonstrates a well-developed ability to identify language features of texts and evaluate their effect on meaning Comprehends and interprets the meaning of texts Demonstrates a well developed ability to control language and structure a persuasive text Writes a sophisticated, persuasive text employing a wide range of well-chosen persuasive devices Demonstrates a developed ability to identify language features of texts and evaluate their effect on meaning Comprehends and interprets the meaning of texts Demonstrates a developed ability to control language and structure a persuasive text Writes a persuasive text employing a wide range of persuasive devices 41-50 31-40 Demonstrates a sound ability to identify language features of texts and explain their effect on meaning Comprehends the meaning of texts Demonstrates a sound ability to control language and structure a persuasive text Writes a persuasive text employing some persuasive devices 21-30 Demonstrates an ability to identify some language features of texts Demonstrates a limited comprehension of the text Demonstrates a limited ability to control language and structure a persuasive text Writes a text in response to some elements of the autobiographical text 11-20 Demonstrates a limited comprehension of the text Demonstrates a limited ability to control language and structure a text Writes a text in response to some elements of the autobiographical text 0-10Tect 1: Sally Morgan, My Place Playing truant by the time turned foueteen and was in second year high school, I was becoming more and more aware that J was different to the other kids at school. I had Jitile in common with the ils in my class, Even Steph was changing, She no longer raced me to the top of the tree in her yard and she thought my frequent absences {rom school were something fo be ashamed of Hill was in high school now and, as 1 expected, was having no difficulty at all in fitting in. Sometimes, 1 desperately wished 1 could be more like her. Everything seemed to be so hard for me. Even little Helen bad taken. to school like a duck to water. She began primary school that year. "Maybe she'll be the doctor then,’ I said sarcastically. “Yes, pethaps you're right,’ Mum replied thoughtfully. ‘Ym sure you'N all do well, once you set your minds to it.” “Yeal, but setting your mind to it, that’s the hard part.” ‘You could do anything, if you really wanted to.’ ‘But that’s just it, Mum, don’t want to," When { looked at other people, I realised how abnormal { was, oF at least, that’s how } felt. None of my brothers and sisters seemed to be tonnented by the things that tormented me. 1 really felt a5 though I just couldn't understand the world any more. It was horrible being a teenager. Patt of the reason why 1 hated school was the cegimentation. 1 hated routine. I wanted to do something exciting and different alt the time. | really couldn't see the point in learning about subjects I wasn't interested in. Thad no long-term goals andl my only short-term one was to leave SALLY MORGAN school as soon as I could, found that the only way to cope was to truant as much as possible, Reing away from school gave me time to think and relieved the pressure, | always felt better inside after { truanted. Twas starting to become an expett in ways to miss school. Orie way was to deliberately miss the school bus that pulled up in front of ous local library, 1 would walk to the stop with Jil, then, when she was talking to hor friends, 1 would nick off and bide behind the library building, Atter the bus had pulled in, collected is passengers and left, 1 would reappear _and walk happily home. My excuse to Mum was that the bus was too crowded to fit me on. For some reason, she either believed me or just accepted it. But one morning, Jill decided she and her friends would truant also. [ wasn’t keen to help. There were too many of them and they'd never done it before. However, Jill was eager for me to show everyone the ropes, so agreed. ive of us hid behind the library that moming, and when the bus pulled in, we all had a chuckle, However, our smiling faces soon changed to dismay when, instead of driving off, the bus remained parked at our stop. We were soon joined by an older girl, who had walked up to where we were hiding and said crossly, ‘You might as well come out. The driver is not going to leave without, you." Jil’ friends were so embarrassed. Trying to truant was the most adventurous thing they had ever done, They were all pettified the story would get back to their parents, At least I didn’t have that worry. Reluctantly, we all walked back down to the bus, accompanied by the boos, jeers and laughter of the forty teenagers already seated ‘You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves, the driver growled as we hopped on. ‘I'l be checking behind there every morning from now on.’ As we drove to school, | sighed and looked out the window at the passing bush, That was the trouble when amateurs were involved, you always got ‘caught. I decided that, from then on, I'd only take Jill with me. It was also reasonably easy to leave school during recess and Iunch-time. Our school was enclosed by bush on three sides. Keeping my eye on the teacher on playground duty, 1 would slowly edge my way towards the bush. Once I was really close, I would turn and run, then squat down behind a tree and wait to see if anyone was coming after me. If the coast was clear, I'd walk, the three miles home, sticking to the cover of the bush and away from busy Manning Road. Pretty soon, a few other students caught on to the same idea. Sometimes, we'd come across one another in the bush, grin guiltily, and then press on, pretending we hadn't seen each other, Now and then, Jill came with me, but, in her opinion, the joy of missing school wasn’t worth the long walk home. One time, jill talked me into allowing her best friend, Robin, to accompany us. I thought this was a bit risky, because Robin’s father was the mathematics teacher, Sure enough, the Head happened to be driving along Manning Road that morning, spotted us in the bush, picked us up and took us back to school. Poor Robin copped the worst. ‘You, of all girls,’ he scolded her. ‘We expect it of the Milroys, but not of girls of your calibre.’ ‘The school began enforcing stricter rules in an attempt to reduce the high rate of truancy by some of its students. Mum had been threatened with the Truant Officer many times. To her, this was as bad as having a policeman call. So she began to try and make us stay at school all day. She was in a difficult situation, because, while she wanted us to have a good education and to get on in the world, she was also sympathetic to our claims of being bored, tired or unhappy. Also, I knew it wasn’t the fact that we truanted so much that upset her, but that now and then we got caught. Getting caught inevitably brought us to the personal attention ot the schoorstan, which also meant that, in some way, she lost face In their eyes. Like most people, I suppose, Mum liked other people, especially those who were educated, to think well of her. She was particularly upset after one visit to our Head. He had shown her three different sets of handwriting, all purporting to be hers, and all excusing either Jill or me from a morning or afternoon at school. ‘You've got to get yourselves organised,’ she told us crossly, ‘if you're going to forge notes from me, at least do it in the same style.’Text 2: Roald Dahl, Going Solo Going Solos a'soque! to’ Boy. TeSé two books foun the autobiography of the author, Roald Dab. {nthis tex Dahl wtés abouts experience as’ young and inexperienced World War I pl in the Foyal Air Force Be Dogfight over Khalkis Tam writing this forty-five years afterwards, but I still etain an absolutely clear picture of Khalkis and how it looked from a few thousand feet up on. a bright-blue early April morning. The little town with its sparkling white houses and red-tiled roofs stood on the edge of the waterway, and behind the town I could see the jagged grey-black mountains where I had chased, the Ju 88s the day before. Inland, I could see a wide valley and there were ‘green flelds in the valley and among the fields there were splashes of the ‘most brilliant yellow I had ever seen, The whole landscape looked as though it had been painted on to the surface of the earth by Vincent Van. Gogh. On all sides and wherever I looked there was this dazzling Panorama of beauty, and for a moment or two I was so overwhelmed by it all that I didn’t see the big Ju 88 screaming up at me from below until he was almost touching the underbelly of my plane. He was climbing right up at me with the tracer pouring like yellow fire out of his blunt perspex nose and in that thousandth of a second I actually saw the German front-gunner crouching over his gun and gripping it with both hands as he squeezed the trigger. I saw his brown helmet and his pale face ‘with no goggles over the eyes and he was wearing some sort of a black ‘Alying-suit. I yanked my stick back so hard the Hurricane shot vertically upwards like a rocket. The violent change of direction blacked me out completely, and when my sight returned my plane was at the top of a vertical climb and standing on its tail with almost no forward movement at all. My engine was spluttering and beginning to vibrate. I've been hit, T thought, I’ve been hit in the engine, I rammed the stick hard forward ‘and prayed she would respond. By some miracle, the aircraft dropped its nose and the engine began to pick up and within a few seconds the marvellous machine was flying straight and level once again. But where was the German? looked down and spotted him about 1000 feet below me, His wings were silhouetted against the blue water of the bay, and I could hardly believe it ‘but he was actually ignoring me completely and was beginning to make his bombing run over the ammunition ship! | opened the throttle and dived after him. In eight seconds I was on him, but I was diving so steeply and so fast that when the great grey-green bomber came into my sights, I was onlyable to get in a very short burst and then I was past him and yanking back hard on the stick to stop myself from diving on into the water. had made a mess of it. For the second time running | had gone barging in to the attack without pausing for just a fraction of a second to work out the best way of doing things. I roared upwards again and banked round sharply to have another go at him. He was still heading for the ship. But then something quite startling happened. 1 saw his nose drop suddenly downwards and he went plunging head first in an absolutely straight vertical line into the blue waters of Khalkis Bay. He hit the water not far from the ship and there was a tremendous white splash and then the waves closed over him and he was gone. How on earth did 1 manage that? I wondered. ‘The only explanation I could think of was that a lucky bullet must have hit the pilot so that he slumped over his stick and pushed it forward and down she went. I could see several Greek seamen on the deck of the ship waving their caps at me and I waved back at them. That is how stupid I was. I quite literally sat there in my cockpit waving away at the Greek seamen below, forgetting ‘that I was in a hostile sky that could be seething with German aircraft When I stopped waving and looked around me, I saw something that ‘made me jump. There were aeroplanes everywhere. They were diving and climbing and turning and banking wherever I looked, and they all had black and white crosses on their bodies and black swastikas on their tails. I knew right away what they were. They were the dreaded little German Messerschmitt 109 fighters. I had never seen one before but I knew darn well what they looked like. I swear there must have been thirty or forty of, ‘them within a few hundred yards of me. It was like having a swarm of wasps around your head and quite honestly I did not know what to do next, It would have been suicide to stay and fight, and in any event my duty was to save my plane at all costs. The Germans had hundreds of fighters. We had only a few left. I shoved the stick forward and opened the throttle and dived flat out for the ground, I had a feeling that if 1 could fly very low and very dangerously over the treetops and hedges then the German pilots might not be prepared to take the same risk. When I levelled out from the dive I was doing about 300 miles an hour and flying some twenty feet above the ground. That is below rooftop level and is a fairly hairy thing to do at such a speed. But I was in a hairy situation. 1 was flying up the yellow Van Gogh valley now and a swift glance in my rear-view mirror showed a bunch of 109s right on my tail. ‘went lower. I went so low I actually had to leapfrog over the small olive trees that were scattered around everywhere. Then { took a huge but calculated tisk and went lower still, almost brushing the grass in the fields, I knew the Germans couldn’t hit me unless they came down to my height, and even if they did, the concentration required to fly a plane very fast at almost ground level was so great they would hardly be able to shoot straight at the same time, You may not believe it but { can cemember having literally to Tift my plane just a tiny fraction to clear a stone wall, and once there was @ herd of brown cows in front of me and I'm not sure I didn't clip some of their horns with my propeller as | skimmed over them. Suddenly the Messerschimitts had had enough, In the mirror [saw them pull away one after the other, and ob the relief of being able to climb up toa safer height and to go whistling back over the mountains to Flevsis.