Lesson video

Hello and welcome to your lesson today on finding evidence to help our language analysis.

We'll be working on the extract from "After Dark" by Murakami in today's lesson.

Our learning outcome for today is to be able to use a range of meaningful and relevant evidence to support our language analysis.

We have four keywords today.

They are relevant, meaningful, connotations and patterns.

Pause the video and familiarise yourself with those definitions there.

Off you go.

We'll be revisiting each of these keywords in today's lesson.

So let's start our lesson now.

In our first learning cycle, we'll be looking at what it means to select relevant, meaningful evidence from a text, and we'll be learning exactly what makes evidence relevant and what makes evidence meaningful.

In the second learning cycle, we'll be learning how to link evidence together in order to support our ideas.

So let's begin with selecting relevant and meaningful evidence from a text.

I want you to read the opening paragraph from chapter one of Murakami's "After Dark." Pause the video and get reading.

The first question I want you to discuss after reading that extract is how would you describe the city in your own words? Because the city is described in a really interesting and extraordinary way in this extract.

How would you describe the city in your own words? Pause the video and discuss.

Perhaps you said the city seems futuristic, the city seems mysterious.

The city seems as if it is alive.

And now, which quotations stood out to you as being particularly descriptive? Pause the video and discuss.

You may have picked out words like arteries, like blood cells, and even verbs, such as pulsing, sending and collecting.

Well done there.

Now we've looked for some evidence about the city, but we need to make sure that we are picking evidence that is relevant and meaningful.

If we were looking for evidence, which describes the city, which piece of evidence is the most relevant? Is it bird or creature? Pause the video and reflect upon that question there.

Which piece of evidence is the most relevant when describing the city? So the word creature is the most relevant as it was used in the extract to describe the city.

The word bird was not used to describe the city.

It was used to describe the point of view of the narrator.

Therefore, the word bird is not relevant to the question.

So when you're looking for evidence, you need to make sure you know exactly what the question's asking you to look for.

We were looking for evidence only describing the city.

Now, we also need to make sure we're choosing meaningful evidence.

So which piece of evidence is the most meaningful? Is it gigantic or pulsing? Pause the video and reflect upon which piece of evidence is the most meaningful.

Off you go.

So the word gigantic, although interesting, does not hold much hidden meaning.

It is simply a synonym for big arguably.

However, the word pulsing has connotations of energy and urgency.

It can tell us more about the city than the word gigantic.

So make sure when you're looking for your evidence that you're choosing words or phrases that hold the most meaning, words and phrases that you can dig deeper into, words and phrases that have really powerful connotations.

Let's check your understanding of what we've talked about so far then.

The most meaningful piece of evidence will be A, a word with a simple meaning.

B, any word that links to the question.

Or C, a word that has a deeper meaning or powerful connotations.

Pause the video and complete the sentence.

Well done if you said the most meaningful piece of evidence will be a word that has a deeper meaning or powerful connotations.

Remember, when we talk about connotations, we mean what the word makes us feel, think or imagine or the image that comes to our head when we read that word.

So if we get a really strong image in our head of something as we read a word, or if we have a really strong feeling about a word, that means a word has powerful connotations, and that's just like the word pulsing.

We said the word pulsing has connotations of energy, urgency, whereas the word gigantic simply means big or very big.

We couldn't say much more about it.

Now, some of our Oak students have had a go at answering the question, how does Murakami use language to describe the city? I want you to read the student responses.

Izzy said, "The noun creature is important because it shows that the city is almost like an animal or an alien." Aisha said, "Murakami uses the word midnight to create a sinister tone to the extract." and Andeep said, "Arteries and blood cells imply that the city is active, even in the dead of night, just as the human body continues to circulate blood whilst people sleep." Now we've read each of the student responses, I want you to order the student responses from most to least effective, basing your judgement on which students include relevant and meaningful evidence.

Pause the video and order the responses from most to least effective.

Make sure you are basing your judgement on who selected the most meaningful and relevant evidence.

Off you go.

Let's go through what you might have said.

So how does Murakami use language to describe the city? That was the question the Oak students were tasked with.

Aisha has not used relevant evidence in her response.

She's picked out the word midnight, but midnight is not used to describe the city in the extract.

Therefore, Aisha hasn't focused her response on what the question's asking her.

So we could say her response is the least effective out of the three.

Izzy has used the quote "creature" in her response and her evidence is relevant and meaningful because the word creature is indeed used to describe the city, and the word creature does have connotations of being other worldly, of being like an animal or an alien.

So therefore, her evidence is meaningful.

So Izzy's response is effective.

However, Andeep's evidence is relevant and the most meaningful.

He's picked out the words arteries and blood cells.

These two pieces of evidence are really interesting and unique in the way that they describe the city, and it's enabled Andeep to make a more complex and detailed analysis of the city.

We can see here then that picking the most meaningful evidence will help you create the most detailed and perceptive analysis.

Let's move on to our second learning cycle now where we'll link evidence together in order to support our ideas.

Now, we're going to read two responses to the same question: how does Murakami use language to present the city? I want you to discuss which response is more effective and why.

Here's response A.

Murakami uses a simile to compare the city to a huge creature.

This makes the city seem vast and quite terrifying because it is compared with something that is not human, and that is very big.

This would make the reader feel quite frightened as the city is presented in an intimidating way.

Response B.

Murakami compares the city to a creature and an organism.

This then escalates into an extended metaphor of the city as a body with arteries, blood cells, all parts of a body.

By transforming these two similes into an extended metaphor, Murakami emphasises the idea that the city has a life of its own.

Now, we've read both responses, so pause the video and discuss which response is more effective and why.

Off you go.

So you might have said that response B is more effective.

This is because it doesn't simply look at one piece of evidence; it looks at a variety of evidence together.

It looks at creature, organism, arteries, blood cells, and it links them together to form a perceptive, and complete idea about the city.

We can make our language effective more.

We can make our language analysis more effective, just like in response B, by linking evidence together to support our ideas.

So to help us successfully link evidence together, we should look for patterns in the text, and that's exactly what response B did.

So what patterns can you spot within the first paragraph of "After Dark?" Pause the video and discuss that.

You may have noticed that Murakami uses a lot of words relating to biology in the human body.

For example, arteries, blood cells, metabolism, circulating, pulsing.

Those words form a pattern in the text and they form a pattern because they're all linked via the theme of biology or the human body.

Now, once we notice a pattern in a text, we need to start looking at the evidence as a collection, rather than each individual piece of evidence separately.

So instead of analysing the word arteries and then analysing the word blood cells, and then analysing the word metabolism, we should be analysing arteries, blood cells, metabolism, circulating and pulsing all together because Murakami has used those words as a collection to craft the city.

Now, if someone saw the word creature and decided to immediately analyse this word without looking for patterns, their analysis may be rather basic like this.

"The noun creature is important because it shows that the city is almost like an animal or alien." But if someone continued to study the text and actively search for patterns, their analysis becomes more sophisticated.

Murakami compares the city to a creature and an organism.

This then escalates into an extended metaphor of the city as a body with arteries, blood cells, or parts of a body, emphasising the city having a life of its own.

So sometimes we really need to be patient with an extract.

We really need to read it a couple of times and find the patterns in order to make our analysis the most effective.

Let's check your understanding of what we've talked about so far.

What can help strengthen your analysis? A, actively searching for patterns within a text.

B, zooming into the first interesting word you find in an extract.

Or C, only analysing language devices.

Pause the video and answer that question.

Well done if you said, actively searching for patterns within a text will strengthen our analysis.

This is because writers purposely consider the words they use when they're writing their text and how they all link together.

They purposely craft these patterns in a text to create interesting images in our heads of the things they're describing.

Therefore, it's really important to notice these patterns and talk about these patterns if we truly want to make our language analysis the most effective and the most thorough.

Now, I want you to write a paragraph in response to the question, how does Murakami use language to describe the city? Ensure you link evidence together to support your response, just as we've been learning to do.

You could choose one of the below ideas to write about.

You could talk about the city as being presented as a living being.

You could analyse how the city is presented as busy and active.

You could look at how the city is presented in an ominous way, or how the city is presented as dangerous, or perhaps you want to combine some of those ideas together.

So pause the video now and write your paragraph answering the question, how does Murakami use language to describe the city? Pause the video and get writing.

Excellent effort there.

Here are some ideas about the patterns in the text, which you might have included.

This city is presented as a living being via words such as creature, organism, and arteries.

The extended metaphor helps to create an image of a bustling city in the reader's mind.

The pulsing and flickering and flaring of the city could reflect how every inch of the network is occupied, each with a unique energy as midnight approaches.

And this city is presented as a complex network through the continuous way in which it sends and collects data.

The language here could emphasise how the residual action of the city seems automated now the buzz has calmed down.

So each of those pieces of analysis link evidence together in different ways.

Ultimately, you can find different patterns within a text so long as you have something interesting to say about it.

Well done on that task.

Here's what we've learned today.

When looking for quotations useful for analysis, we need to ensure our evidence is relevant and meaningful.

Meaningful evidence is language with powerful connotations that you can dig deeper into.

We can make our language analysis more effective by linking evidence together to support our ideas and actively search for patterns in language to strengthen your language analysis.

You've worked really hard in tackling a really complex text today, and you've come up with some brilliant analysis.

I hope you're feeling very proud of yourself.

Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope to see you in another lesson soon.