PURPOSE
Students write for a large number of reasons and must learn how to adapt their writing for different purposes.
To help student learn how to organise and vary their writing, LISA focuses on three purposes. This aligns with various international curricula such as the NZ Curriculum (e.g. PaCT), the new Australian Curriculum and the Common Core State Standards in the USA.
Assessments in LISA ask students to write for one of the 3 following purposes:
- Explain
Write to inform others. This might be to share information, explain complex ideas, or describe a process or how something worlds. - Persuade
Write to persuade others. This may be to get someone to do something, or to get them to agree with the writer about something. - Narrate
Write to tell or describe a real or imagined story, experience or event.
Many teachers, especially in subjects such as English / Language Arts, may want to use a more specific purpose that they expect students to write for, e.g. describe a process, describe a moment in time.
AUDIENCE
Students should also be aware of the audience they are writing for. They may be writing to a customer with a business proposal or to a politician to request funding, and so they must adapt their writing to me most effective.
As with purpose, LISA has simplified the possible audiences that students write to. It identifies the audience by age and function.
- Age
Readers are categorised into one of four age brackets … children, teenagers, adult, retired. - Function
Readers will be reading for one of 3 functions … decision-makers, interested readers, independents.
Decision-makers include people such as local politicians or the school board. Interested readers might be newspaper or blog readers, i.e. they enjoy reading, with or without a specific interest in the topic. Independent readers might be people reading a brochure in a waiting room or reading advertising, i.e. they're reading with no prior reason or interest.