Readers, writers, and texts -

contexts of production and
reception influence meanings.
By George Mato, Jenith Shah, Akili Chiume
BEFORE WE START WE MUST FIRST:
Split the title into two parts: the first part will be “Readers,
writers, and texts”.
The second part will be “contexts of production and reception
influence meanings”.
We are doing this to better help us
understand the meaning of the title of this presentation.
Readers, writes, and texts:
- This area introduces students to the essence of language and literature and places a great emphasis on viewing literature
texts as art rather than just some words.
- Students have to pay close attention to the details of the text, in many different ways, so as to understand
the meaning behind the writer’s choice of words.
- Students also will learn the multiple ways in which language and meaning is communicated through words, image and
sound. They will also be able to recognize textual and rhetorical features and how they create or affect meaning.
- You can also choose non-literature texts to help you get better at recognizing textual and rhetorical features across a variety
of text types.

The aim of this area isn’t to just be proficient at recognizing textual and rhetorical features, but to understand how English
professionals(writers) use writing to communicate a message and have a metacognitive awareness of the nature of the
discipline by considering the guiding questions.
When writing a response a student(you) can switch between academic and personal response or creative and the expository
THE GUIDING CONCEPTUAL QUESTIONS OF THIS AREA
THAT YOU HAVE TO CONSIDER:

1.​Why and how do we study language and literature?

2.How are we affected by texts in various ways?
3.In what ways is meaning constructed, negotiated, expressed and interpreted?
4.How does language use vary amongst text types and amongst literary forms?
5.How does the structure or style of a text affect meaning?
6.How do texts offer insights and challenges?
LINKS TO TOK:
The links to TOK of this area revolve around the question of what knowledge can be taken from a piece of text and how
that knowledge was found and whether it is fixed.

SOME EXAMPLES:
1) In the play Othello, we consider Iago as a villain and that is what the writer wanted him to be, but have we ever tried to
consider maybe it’s Othello’s fault for not proving Iago’s tales from the start or when they started getting serious. What
I’m trying to do here is challenge the fixed perception that the tragedy in Othello was all because of Iago.
2) In the literature story of 1984, we understand that the people live in a totalitarian world and that their don’t have
human freedoms such as being in love with someone and for most of the readers we deem this to be a world worser than
hell and we also consider the people living in this world are unhappy. But why exactly do we think that the people are
unhappy based on just the description of the environment. Is happiness not subjective like knowledge?
Here I am highlighting that we have biased views on things, even if they are deemed(by the majority) to be right because
just by the mention of a world like 1984, we automatically assume that it is, a bad place, to be in and for its inhabitants.
This sort of knowledge could have been from personal experience or just a plain assumption.
Contexts of production and reception influence
meanings
In contexts of production and reception influence we look at how the time period and culture affects how a reader
interprets a text
Context of production:
• What is meant by context of production
➙So, basically context of production are the cultural and historical factors
that affect the content and the style of the text.
➙Adding on the context of productions texts are fixed as - it is written by a
particular person which was also written in the particular place within a
curtain time grace. This thereby not only has an influence on what is
written about but how its written
Context of reception:

• The historical and cultural factors that affect how a text is interpreted
by a reader is called context of reception.
Unlike the fixed context of production the context of a texts reception
can vary dramatically.
This shift in context of reception can be extreme as the text which is
written today will still be read years later by the audiences of that time.
Those future readers will have to workout the meaning of the text and
they will interpret the text in a different way.