ATAR Notes: Forum

VCE Stuff => VCE English Studies => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE English & EAL => Topic started by: Jason12 on May 29, 2014, 08:47:59 pm

Title: What exactly is metalanguage in LA?
Post by: Jason12 on May 29, 2014, 08:47:59 pm

My English teacher says the metalanguage part of the criteria for LA does not mean naming persuasive  techniques i.e. the writer uses an appeal to family values, and says we don't need to specifically name them at all. Is this is the same as what VCAA assessors generally expect? How about if you are juxtaposing or using a euphemism? You have to say the author juxtaposes or the author euphemistically describes this etc right?

My teacher rather says metalanguage includes words like the writer compels, accentuates, highlights and tones. Is this correct?

Title: Re: What exactly is metalanguage in LA?
Post by: literally lauren on May 30, 2014, 12:19:37 pm

Metalanguage: language that describes language. You're right, this doesn't just apply to naming techniques and devices; verbs/adverbs like 'accentuates' or 'euphemistically' are classed as metalanguage also.
Basically VCAA wants you to use words to analyse rather than summarise, so advocating metalanguage is their subtle way of doing that. If you're doing well in language analysis at the moment, you'll probably find you're doing a lot of this automatically :)