Explore traditional and contemporary texts from Asia through the use of three anthologies, Impressions, Reflections and Dimensions, which offer a wide variety of genres of written and visual texts.
Student activities
Each text is accompanied by online student activities. Most of these activities can be used with or without the text for which they were written.
Impressions
The Impressions text is complemented by online activities with a lower secondary English focus. As there is a strong emphasis on myths and legends in Impressions, these online activities concentrate on The Ramayana as a text. Students also explore aspects of the classic story Journey to the West or 'Monkey'. Students are also invited to explore Shinto as a religion. Students can respond in a variety of ways to website materials, stories and information-focussed resources.
Reflections
The Reflections text is complemented by online activities with a middle secondary English focus. As there is a strong emphasis on poetry, myths, paintings and personal stories in Reflections, these online activities offer students opportunities to explore the writing and biographies of writers such as Murasaki Shikibu, Han Suyin and Rabindranath Tagore. Themes include the ways in which communities manage change, using the oral testimonies of people from Nepal, Pakistan, India and China as the stimulus for discussion. The online activities also invite comparisons between creation myths and explore the place of monomyths in narrative construction. Students are invited to respond in a variety of ways to each theme.
Dimensions
The Dimensions text is complemented by online activities with a senior English focus. As there is a strong focus on politics and political writers in Dimensions, these online activities offer students opportunities to explore themes such as censorship, freedom of the press, the ideas and challenges facing women writers from South Asia and the personal stories of a small ethnic group, the Hmong people who live in the highlands of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and China and in a diaspora which extends to the USA and Australia. Students can respond in a variety of ways to poetry, biography, personal narrative and short stories.
