Composing persuasive multimodal texts in an integrated unit

![CDATA[Open a magazine, listen to the radio or watch television and you will not be able to avoid being persuaded to buy something or take action to support a cause. Even documentaries can be avenues for the delivery of a particular point of view to viewers. Persuasive texts are prevalent in society through advertisements. Learning to understand how these texts persuade us is important for students to learn about, so they can critique the messages and their construction as well as use this knowledge to compose a persuasive multimodal text for their own purposes. The purpose of this unit was to focus on the concept of persuasion. Persuasion is the type of speaking or writing that is intended to make audiences adopt a certain opinion or pursue an action or do both. As Campbell & Ryles note in chapter 2, the persuasive genre is also known as an argument with the purpose to persuade or convince others of a particular point of view and that there are different ways to structure an argument. In this unit of work, we wanted students to explore a variety of persuasive texts including advertisements in print, on television and radio, as well as written and oral compositions. Students were provided with opportunities to analyse the structure and the linguistic and visual devices of persuasive texts and evaluate their effectiveness for a specific audience. The language of persuasion was investigated through the selection of different speech functions (mood), according to generic structure, and the appraisal system of attitude: appreciation, tonal expression, and types of images and colour.]]