Review: Voice Lessons: Classroom Activities to Teach Diction, Detail, Imagery, Syntax and Tone (2000) by Nancy Dean and This Means This This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics (2007) by Sean Hall  

Somewhere in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, its authors Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner write that, in teaching, there should be a five-year moratorium on the use of all textbooks. I can’t, now, remember the exact context of the claim. So, I could be misremembering, but if I am it suits my present purpose. Certainly, it is a bold, polemical statement, the kind of thing that, if you are familiar with Postman’s writing, you would expect from him. Postman and Weingartner’s book was published in 1971. Maybe, back then, teaching was easier, and teachers had more time and could afford to ignore textbooks. But, I doubt it.

The truth is, teaching is hard work. If textbooks exist that help teachers teach and students learn, and the content is stimulating and relevant, then why wouldn’t teachers, judiciously, use them? And, if textbooks save time in an otherwise frenetic existence, to use them is surely, as your students may say, a no-brainer.

There are two textbooks that I have put to work in my classroom for several years now: The first is Voice Lessons: Classroom Activities to Teach Diction, Detail, Imagery, Syntax and Tone (2000) by Nancy Dean. The second is This Means This This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics (2007) by Sean Hall. Both books contain short activities, with each activity lasting from five to fifteen minutes. The activities in both books can be used at the beginning of lessons as ‘warmer activities’ and enable students to ‘get down to business’ as soon as they enter the classroom. Alternatively, the activities can be selected more purposely to provide focus to a lesson, or they may be used as homework to reinforce learning. However used, the activities in both books are appropriately challenging for students of IB Language and Literature, and develop skills and understanding very relevant to the IB Language and Literature course and its assessment components.

Dean’s book is all about the written mode, and has a particular focus on literature. It contains 100 self-contained exercises. Designed, originally, for the Advanced Placement English curriculum in the United States, Voice Lessons aims to encourage the development of close, critical reading skills, focusing on five areas: diction, detail, imagery, syntax, and tone. Each individual exercise follows the same model; there is a quotation from a literary text, two directed questions for students, and a short extension activity in which students are asked to apply their understanding. At the end of the book, Dean includes a helpful ‘discussion’ section in which each of the 100 quotations is considered.

Hall’s book does for the visual mode what Dean’s book does for written texts. Its title contains that forbidding word, semiotics. It is probably no wonder that the word engenders fear; the writing of the foremost ‘semioticians’, writers such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Charles Sanders Peirce, to name drop a few, are seldom recognized for the conspicuous simplicity of their prose. The brilliance of Hall’s book is the way that it straightforwardly demystifies semiotics. He provides a sequence of 75 images, each with an explanation provided on the image’s reverse side, for students to consider. It’s ideal for teaching visual texts in a way that students find fun and engaging. The visual images in Hall’s book are, as you would expect, reproduced, where appropriate, in colour. The IB does not, at the time of writing, publish Language and Literature examinations in colour.

That time flies is bad news that we need to live with. But, we can at least control how we spend the time we do have. Voice Lessons and This Means This Means That will save you time for other things and, along the way, may inform your teaching.