A)+Resource+1

Resource 1
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**Brief explanation of resource** The BBC website is a reputable source which contains a wealth of information on various world religions, or belief systems including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. It describes different viewpoints through exploring the different beliefs or religious persuasions, as well as pertinent background information about the religion and ways of living of people who practice the religion.

**Relevance of the resource to the HSIE outcome** The website is particularly relevant to the sequence of lessons because it contains useful information regarding festivals and celebrations specific to each religion and allows students to build up their knowledge on a specific religion in preparation for their task of creating a video interview about a religious celebration. The information is presented through a multimodal approach, utilising text, images and videos, which gives student the opportunity to be exposed to and interpret information presented in a variety of ways (Board of Studies New South Wales, 2007, p. 56). The website is an example of the facilities available to new media of information and communication, including interactivity and also it’s ability to draw on a number of modes in the making of the text, namely linguistic, visual and audio (in the form of a video) (Healy, 2004, p. 21; Kress, 2003, pp. 48-49).

**Aspect of literacy suitable to be explored** This resource is to be used to build up students’ knowledge and support students’ learning about a specific religion. The information presented in the resource exemplifies many of the key grammatical features of an information report, as well as structural features through the use of general statements followed by descriptions, and sub-headings throughout the content (Board of Studies New South Wales, 1998, p. 223; Board of Studies New South Wales, 2007, p. 70; Droga & Humphrey, 2008, p. 135). As such, the website lends itself well to being used by students as part of their research to write an information report on their chosen religion because it provides information whilst also modelling this particular text type.

The text presented in the website contains key grammatical features of an information report such as technical nouns related to the specific religion; use of adjectival phrases and clauses to provide further information about noun groups; use of relating verbs to classify the topic; use of action verbs to explain activities and behaviours; use of simple present tense which is reflective of the general nature of the information; and a variety of simple, compound and complex sentences to convey information (Droga & Humphrey, 2008, p. 135). The website furthers the students’ understanding of their chosen religion through the use of striking visual images depicting important places of worship; symbols which are iconic to each faith and photographic and illustrative depictions of religious ceremonies and celebrations. The photographs are a mixture of close-up shots, predominantly depictions of important symbols of the particular religion, such as a religious sculpture, and also medium and long shots of practising followers of the different religions, which reflects the impersonal social distance between the viewer of the images and the people in the photographs (Unsworth, 2001, p. 96). There are also a range of angles or points of view from which the images are taken (Unsworth, 2001, pp. 97-99). For example, there are a number of eye-level medium shots of significant individuals, representing a sense of equality between these individuals and the viewer, as well as many high angle long shots of people practising their faith, demonstrating that the viewer has power over the individuals in the photograph (Unsworth, 2001, p. 98). All of the photographic images have high modality whereby they are naturalistic representations of the people or situations being depicted as all have high colour saturation (Unsworth, 2001, p. 99) The layout of the information draws the viewer’s eyes from the text on the left of each page (‘given’ information), to the accompanying images on the right hand side, (‘new’ information) which serves to provide the reader with a visual representation of the text which has just been read (Unsworth, 2001, p. 104). There are numerous videos included in the website, of particular relevance to the aim of the sequence of lessons is a video on the Islamic celebration, ‘Eid-ul-Adha.’ All videos explore a range of visual literacy features including symbolism, salience, use of colour, various camera angles and shots and many examples of an ‘offer’ to the viewer (Callow, 2006, pp. 11-15). The videos also provide the students with examples of voice-overs to support them in their development of their multimodal text, which may contain a voice-over.