Respond critically to significant aspects of visual and/or oral text(s) through close reading (AS 91480)
Domain: Respond critically to significant aspects of visual and/or oral text(s) through close reading - AS 91480, internal, 3 credits. You analyse unfamiliar visual or oral texts: advertisements, posters, film stills, web pages, speeches, interviews, news clips, music videos.
Close reading method
- Describe precisely what is there before interpreting: shot size, angle, composition, salience, colour, lighting, type, gesture, pace, music.
- Then interpret: what does the choice connote, and what does it make the audience think or feel?
- Then connect: how do image, words and sound combine, and how does that serve a purpose for a particular audience?
- Ask what values or assumptions the text relies on - who is centred, who is absent, what is assumed about the viewer.
Worked example
Poster: a single pair of school shoes hangs by its laces from a telegraph wire; below, small type reads 'Some lessons happen outside school.' Reasoning: the shoes are the only object, isolated against white sky, so salience is total; the low angle makes them loom, turning an ordinary object into evidence; the laces draw a vertical vector down to the words, so the reading path moves from object to claim. Shoes on a wire connote loss, bullying or escape, and the tagline re-frames that image as a lesson - irony the audience must resolve. The text positions viewers as people who already recognise the code, which flatters them into agreement.
Traps
Labelling a technique without stating its effect; describing the image as if the reader cannot see it; ignoring the verbal text; ignoring sound in oral texts; forgetting audience and purpose; missing how elements work together.