Seminar: who is this for, and how do we know?
The class determines audience and purpose for a shared text, requiring textual evidence for each proposal.
- Close Reading Seminar move: Audience judgement argued from shared evidence
- Evidence it produces: An agreed audience with the features that settled it
Route status: the learning intentions and mini-lesson scaffold are shared with the workshop route; the Do Now, activities, adjudication, evidence and exit below are this route’s own. The difference is how ākonga work — one shared text, competing claims settled on the words, and a collective record — not which strategies are taught.
Lesson 8: Evaluating Text Purpose & Target Audience
Building confident, active readers through Te Ao Māori perspectives, comprehension strategies, and rich Aotearoa texts.
🎯 Ngā Whāinga Akoranga | Learning Intentions
Authorial purpose (to inform, persuade, entertain, instruct, explain), target audience profiling (age, background, interest), and how tone/language adapt for different audiences.
Determine author purpose across various text formats (advertisements, news reports, poetry, pūrākau), analyse tone, and profile target audiences.
🎥 Media Anchor & Pedagogical Scaffold
Author Purpose (PIE) & Audience Analysis
Video: kaiako to select — guidance below.
🎬 Kaiako: Select and embed a video here
Suggested search: "Author Purpose (PIE) & Audience Analysis"
Search YouTube for a short clip (5–10 min) on this topic. Verify it is age-appropriate and plays correctly before embedding.
🧠 1. Before Viewing (Activate & Predict)
How does an author change their choice of words when writing a video game review for teenagers versus a scientific letter to a mayor?
👁️ 2. During Viewing (Watch With a Job)
- Early in the clip: Apply PIE framework: Persuade, Inform, Entertain (plus Explain & Instruct).
- Midway: Analyse register: formal academic language vs informal slang vs conversational tone.
- Later in the clip: Identify visual design elements (fonts, colours, imagery) tailored to specific target audiences.
🗣️ 3. After Viewing & Kaiako Move (Process & Apply)
Kaiako Move: Display 4 different media texts covering the same topic (conservation) targeting children, scientists, politicians, and tourists.
Immediate Task: Complete Section 8 of your Reading Journal: Purpose & Target Audience Analysis Grid.
⚡ Whakaoho | Do Now: Two texts, same topic (8 mins)
The kaiako displays two texts on the same topic aimed at different readers. Read both silently. Write one line: which text is for whom — first instinct only, evidence comes next.
🗣️ Activity 1: Competing profiles (20 mins)
Teams take a text each and build its profile — purpose and audience — under the seminar’s standing rule: the deciding evidence must be linguistic, not topical. “It’s about conservation so it’s for scientists” is out of order; “it says biodiversity offsetting without explaining it, so it assumes an expert reader” is in. Teams present; the class challenges any profile whose evidence is really about topic.
⚖️ Adjudication: settle both profiles (12 mins)
- The class settles each text’s purpose and audience, recording the deciding linguistic evidence — the vocabulary, sentence shapes, and assumptions that carried the ruling.
- Then the comparison: the class lists what changed between the two texts (and what stayed the same) when the imagined reader changed.
- Final test: the kaiako reads one sentence from a third, unseen text on the topic. The class predicts its audience from language alone — then checks.
If the class can call an unseen text’s audience from one sentence, the lesson has transferred.
📋 Activity 2: The class grid (10 mins)
Record: each text → purpose → audience → the deciding linguistic evidence → what changed between them. One-minute individual entry: the single linguistic feature that settled an argument today.
🚪 Exit (5 mins)
One line: a linguistic feature (quoted) that settled a profile argument, and what it proved.
🏫 Kaiako Planning & Pedagogy Notes
Years 7–8 Curriculum Alignment: Te Mātaiaho English Phase 3 — Reading and Viewing for meaning. Builds core comprehension, critical literacy, and cultural connectedness through Aotearoa literature and pūrākau.