discoveringthe power to influence tone, mood, style, voice, and meaning

Standard: Language9-10
To be college and career ready in language, students must have firm control over the conventions of standard English. At the same time, they must come to appreciate that language is as at least as much a matter of craft as of rules and be able to choose words, syntax, and punctuation to express themselves and achieve particular functions and rhetorical effects. (CCSS, 51)
Featured Skill: Students will understand how placement of punctuation, including semicolons and colons,can affect meaning in a short story. / Grade Level: 10 (Suggested for grade 10)
Lesson Summary:
In this lesson, students will read, reread and analyze the language use in the short story “The Train from Rhodesia” by Nadine Gordimer.
Featured Text / Theme and/or Essential Question
Primary Text:
  • “The Train From Rhodesia” by Nadine Gordimer
Secondary Text (choice of the following):
  • Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  • Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

  • Any other 10th grade novel that examines the effects of colonialism
/
  • How do choices in use of punctuation affect meaning?
  • How can the use of specific diction and imagery affect the overall tone of a work?
  • When a new culture supplants a traditional culture, what are the effectsof the cultural clash on members of both cultures?
  • What are the immediate effects of colonialism?
  • What are the long-lasting effects of colonialism?

Process / Activity / Instructional Steps
Instruction / Modeling and explaining the featured grammar skill / 1.Background: Students should, in grades 6-8, learn about semicolons, colons and other punctuation and how the use of specific punctuation can convey specific meanings. Students may not have explored using punctuation in terms of purposeful inclusion in order to impact meaning. Students may not have an understanding of the choices they have in punctuation and how those choices ultimately create emphasis on a particular element.
2.In this particular lesson, the teacher will not model the featured skill. Students will engage in a close reading of the short story “The Train from Rhodesia” by Nadine Gordimer in order to determine the usage and impact of the grammatical conventions. This lesson guides students to discover the impact of usage in a piece of writing. For students to become well acquainted with the text, multiple opportunities to read the selection will be necessary.
Practice
in Context / Reading text and identifying deliberate use of the featured grammar skill / Reading 1: Student reading
3.We encourage the reading of the entire selection before the close study in order to provide a context for the particular excerpt in this lesson. Independently, students will read and annotate the selections from the short story “The Train from Rhodesia” by Nadine Gordimer. When they annotate, encourage the students to mark passages that show very descriptive imagery, write questions beside parts they don’t understand and underline and then mark any other sentence they feel may be important. Remind students that annotating is not the underlining of the text; it is what they write in the margins to explain WHY they underlined something. On this first reading, students will mainly be reading for comprehension.
Reading 2: Teacher or fluent reader reading
4.Teachers may want to read the section aloud while being careful not to overly influence meaning with inflection. Students need to hear all the words pronounced correctly; delivery includes deliberate choices that could begin to rob students of the opportunity to make meaning based on the word choice, word order, and punctuation. Students will want to translate the text. As students gain understanding, they will want to make adjustments to the translation. Teachers may choose to break this reading into sections and stop and ask questions as they go through the selection.
Reading 3: Small Groups: Annotating for specific technique and answering questions to engage in the text
5.Students will work in groups of four to analyze the story for a particular literary technique. This will begin to lead them to analyze the story as a whole. Move students into four different groups (number of groups/ students in group will depend on the number of students in the class.)
Group One: Punctuation (semicolons, colons, commas)
Group Two: Imagery (use of interesting adjectives to create a picture of this place and people)
Group Three: Parallel structure (The repetition of patterns of words, phrases or clauses)
Group Four: Syntax (Sentence structure—looking for changes in sentence length)
(These groups should be predetermined based on student strengths. Teachers can determine though use of prior assessments or a preassessment where to place students.)
6.Students will continue to annotate the short story as a group for their group’s literary device as shown above. Each group should underline three examples of their language device on the short story. It would work well if each group had a different color pen to use (blue for punctuation, red for imagery, etc.) In the margin, they should annotate the effect of the punctuation on the story.
7.Students will then fill in the section of the chart for their language technique.
8.Students will then switch groups (jigsaw) and will be responsible for summarizing and teaching the new group the discoveries that the original group made. Students will all fill in the chart as each student takes turns leading the discussion.
Analyzing and Evaluating : Rereading to discover
9.Students will now use the annotations they’ve made to answer questions about the text. This questions can be reduced once students are more comfortable with annotating and discussing more independently; they will help guide students to an understanding of how language is used in the text to create meaning.
The questions are intended to promote understanding/comprehension; however, these are not questions that are all necessarily ‘right there’ types of questions. The questions all require students to return to the text and potentially locate additional information to increase understanding.
Application
in Writing / Writing text and applying the featured grammar skill in a deliberate way / Writing: Use the featured skill(s)
10.Students will choose one of the writing options available. (See options on student activity sheet)
11.Students will be asked to interpret, analyze and evaluate the author’s choice in language in their writing assignment. Evaluate the use of the skill in other works, connecting their discoveries in the Train From Rhodesia” to a text they are currently reading in World Literature.
Extensions / Additional Resources / For extension: (Students may be provided options for extension activities)
  1. Have students rewrite paragraph 8 that begins with “Here, let me see that one—“ OR paragraph 17 that begins “The young woman drew her head in” removing all semicolons and replacing them either with periods or with commas and coordinating conjunctions. Students should write a paragraph in a group that explains the effect of the change of punctuation on the overall meaning of the paragraph and of the story as a whole. Students should present their findings to the class orally.

Extensions / Additional Resources / For extension: (Students could be provided options for extension activities)
  1. Students could compare the punctuation, imagery, parallel structure and syntax (phrasing) in this short story with that in the first chapter of novel Cry, the Beloved Country.Students should determine if the two authors use similar techniques and if these language techniques mirror similar themes in the two works.
  1. Students could contrast the punctuation, imagery, parallel structure and syntax (phrasing) in this short story with that in the final chapter of novel Things Fall Apart.In this chapter there is a different point of view than in the other two works above, and there is a shift in these structures. The contrast works well to discuss point of view.

Intervention and Support / For Intervention and support:
  • Teachers should review the questions for the excerpt carefully. The questions are intended to help the students attend to the reading for comprehension. The use of the questions should be determined by the students in the room. If students are able to read and comprehend without questions that direct them line by line, then these supports can be taken away. Always remember that the purpose of the questions is to promote close reading of the selection; the removal of the direct questions should not remove the opportunity to read carefully and closely. The questions should only be reduced or removed once students are equipped with the annotating and close reading skills necessary to question the text naturally. (See the attached handout).
  • To support students, students should be encouraged to work collaboratively. The first reading should be done by students independently—we want students to have the opportunity to try to find some elements first. Reading aloud is an opportunity for a second reading and to hear all the words pronounced correctly. As students become more intimate with the selection, working collaboratively allows them to build on the ideas of others and negotiate the meaning of particular elements.
  • If students struggle with the grammatical terms (parallel structure, semicolons, etc.) there are some sites in the “Additional Resources to Consider” section to provide review of these terms.

Teacher
Notes /
  • Answer keys are not provided. The lessons are intended to create opportunities for students to rely on the text to gain independence in reading complex texts. In this instructional model, the only wrong answers are those that are not well supported or engage in fallacious reasoning.
  • It is best for teachers to engage in conversations and make instructional decisions with a PLT about this lesson, its content, and student outcomes.
  • You may have noticed that providing background information is not part of the beginning of the lesson. Within the Language Lessons, students will need to rely upon the words and punctuation to create meaning without the assistance of the teacher or other background building activities prior to the learning experience. As students progress through the activities, they will need information and build the background that we typically provide up front. When students enter the world of college and career, they will need to be equipped with the necessary skills to determine context, question a text, determine the information they will need to know to increase understanding, and know where to locate that information.

Additional Resources to Consider / “The Owl at Perdue Online Writing Lab”
“How to Use a Semicolon: The Most Feared Punctuation on Earth.”
Mumford, Carrie. “Editing and My Love for the Semicolon.”

Next pages: materials

LanguagePage 1

Text: “The Train From Rhodesia”

The train came out of the red horizon and bore down towards them over the single straight track.

The stationmaster came out of his little brick station with its pointed chalet roof, feeling the creases in his serge uniform in his legs as well. A stir of preparedness rippled through the squatting native venders waiting in the dust; the face of a carved wooden animal, eternally surprised, stuck out of a sack. The stationmaster’s barefoot children wandered over. From the grey mud huts with the untidy heads that stood within a decorated mud wall, chickens, and dogs with their skin stretched like parchment over their bones, followed the piccanins down to the track. The flushed and perspiring west cast a reflection, faint, without heat, upon the station, upon the tin shed marked “Goods,” upon the walled kraal, upon the grey tin house of the stationmaster and upon the sand, that lapped all around, from sky to sky, cast little rhythmical cups of shadow, so that the sand became the sea, and closed over the children’s black feet softly and without imprint.

The stationmaster’s wife sat behind the mesh of her veranda. Above her head the hunk of a sheep’s carcass moved slightly, dangling in a current of air.

They waited.

The train called out, along the sky; but there was no answer; and the cry hung on: I’m coming…I’m coming…

The engine flared out now, big, whisking a dwindling body behind it; the track flared out to let it in.

Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station.

Here, let me see that one—the young woman curved her body farther out of the corridor window. Missus?smiled the old man, looking at the creatures he held in his hand. From a piece of string on his grey finger hung a tiny woven basket; he lifted it, questioning. No, no, she urged, leaning down towards him, across the height of the train towards the man in the piece of old rug; that one, that one, her hand commanded. It was a lion, carved out of soft, dry wood that looked like spongecake; heraldic, black and white, with impressionistic detail burnt in. The old man held it up to her still smiling, not from the heart, but at the customer. Between its vandyke teeth, in the mouth opened in an endless roar too terrible to be heard, it had a black tongue. Look, said the young husband, if you don’t mind! And round the neck of the thing, a piece of fur (rat? rabbit? meerkat?); a real mane, majestic, telling you somehow that the artist had delight in the lion.

All up and down the length of the train in the dust the artists sprang, walking bent, like performing animals, the better to exhibit the fantasy held towards the faces on the train. Buck, startled and stiff, staring with round black and white eyes. More lions, standing erect, grappling with strange, thin, elongated warriors who clutched spears and showed no fear in their slits of eyes. How much, they asked from the train, how much?

Give me penny, said the little ones with nothing to sell. The dogs went and sat, quite still, under the dining car, where the train breathed out the smell of meat cooking with onion.

A man passed beneath the arch of reaching arms meeting grey-black and white in the exchange of money for the staring wooden eyes, the stiff wooden legs sticking up in the air; went along under the voices and the bargaining, interrogating the wheels. Past the dogs; glancing up at the dining car where he could stare at the faces, behind glass, drinking beer, two by two, on either side of a uniform railway vase with its pale dead flower. Right to the end, to the guard’s van, where the stationmaster’s children had just collected their mother’s two loaves of bread; to the engine itself, where the stationmaster and the driver stood talking against the steaming complaint of the resting beast.

The man called out to them, something loud and joking. They turned to laugh, in a twirl of steam. The two children careered over the sand, clutching the bread, and burst through the iron gate and up the path through the garden in which nothing grew.

Passengers drew themselves in at the corridor windows and turned into compartments to fetch money, to call someone to look. Those sitting inside looked up: suddenly different, caged faced, boxed in, cut off after the contact of the outside. There was an orange a piccanin would like…. What about that chocolate? It wasn’t very nice….

A girl had collected a handful of the hard kind, that no one liked, out of the chocolate box, and was throwing them to the dogs, over at the dining car. But the hens darted in and swallowed the chocolates, incredibly quick and accurate, before they had even dropped in the dust, and the dogs, a little bewildered, looked up with their brown eyes, not expecting anything.

—No, leave it, said the young woman, don’t take it….

Too expensive, too much, she shook her head and raised her voice to the old man, giving up the lion. He held it high where she had handed it to him. No, she said, shaking her head. Three-and-six?insisted her husband, loudly. Yes baas! laughed the old man. Three-and-six?—the young man was incredulous. Oh leave it—she said. The young man stopped. Don’t you want it? he said, keeping his face closed to the old man. No, never mind, she said, leave it. The old native kept his head on one side, looking at them sideways, holding the lion. Three-and-six, he murmured, as old people repeat things to themselves.

The young woman drew her head in. She went into the coupe and sat down. Out of the window, on the other side, there was nothing; sand and bush; and thorn tree. Back through the open doorway, past the figure of her husband in the corridor, there was the station, the voices, wooden animals waving, running feet. Her eye followed the funny little valance of scrolled wood that outlined the chalet roof of the station; she thought of the lion and smiled. That bit of fur round the neck. But the wooden buck, the hippos, the elephants, the baskets that already bulked out of their brown paper under the seat and on the luggage rack! How will they look at home? Where will you put them? What will they mean away from the places you found them? Away from the unreality of the last few weeks? The young man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places.