Year 11 English – Researching Contemporary Issues

To help prepare you for your persuasive speech, the iCentre have put together some tutorials on how to access newspapers on the OPAC and how to find relevant and appropriate videos on ClickView.

The purpose of this assessment is to create a perspective through reasoned argument to persuade an audience. It is an open-ended task responding to representations of a contemporary social issue in the media within the previous year. Students are to respond to the representation of a contemporary social issue in media texts and construct a persuasive argument of their own that adds to the public dialogue or ‘conversation’ about the issue.

In the persuasive spoken response, students are to:

• choose a contentious issue (or a perspective about a contentious issue studied) that has appeared in the media within the previous year. Issues of contemporary social relevance may be drawn from, e.g. the broader topics of gender, power, race, religion, age, class and sustainability
• present a contention or thesis in relation to the chosen issue and develop an argument that reflects a particular perspective and makes use of the ways cultural assumptions, attitudes, values and beliefs underpin perspectives and representations
• generate the argument from critical engagement with media texts about the issue
• employ and synthesise nuanced rhetorical and persuasive strategies to position an audience to accept the perspective constructed in the text.

As this task requires you to explore a contemporary social issue in the media within the previous year, researching newspaper articles is a great place to start. This video tutorial will show you how to access online newspapers from the OPAC. This can only be done while at school, so make sure you save your articles for use at home.

Further to researching newspaper articles, ClickView is a great resource for you to explore contemporary issues being discussed in the Australian media. We have episodes from Australian Story, Compass, Gruen, Insight and so on in our library, which will provide great background information for your research.

We hope these resources will not only help you choose a contentious issue for your speech, but also help you when researching your topic. As always, if you have any questions pop into the iCentre or submit an enquiry through the Ask a Librarian feature of the website.