Unit 1: Introduction
Media Studies · Semester 1 Plan · Unit 1 of 6 · Unit 2 →
Concepts: Four Key Concepts · Media Language
What this unit does
A one-week induction. It sets up Language, Representation, Industry and Audience as the working spine of the two-year course, teaches media as mediation (“a version, not a window”), and drills the discipline A1 will be marked on — denotation before connotation — ending with the course’s first graded task on day three.
Note on numbering: “U1” here refers to the Semester 1 calendar. The coursebook uses a separate numbering system; its Unit 1 (Introduction to Media) covers similar ground at greater length.
Dates & span
W1: Tue 2026-09-01 → Fri 09-04 — 3 teaching days (Tue single, Wed double, Fri single). This is a reduced week with school events around it. These dates may shift when the school publishes its calendar for this period.
Lessons
- L01 The Four Key Concepts
- Day 1: the opener, the “I’m not impacted by media” wager, and the 24-hour media-use log.
- Day 2: the four tools applied to one shared text, then the mediation demo with three named mechanisms — staging (Gardner), selection (Migrant Mother), anchorage (the Underwood caption) — and the card sort.
- Day 3: denotation modeled live, then CS1, a pure-denotation paragraph that must survive a peer hunt for smuggled connotation.
Assessment
| Item | Date | What | AO |
|---|---|---|---|
| CS1 | Fri 2026-09-04 | Analytical paragraph, denotation only, written in class | AO2 |
See the full register.
Key content
- The four Key Concepts applied orally to a shared text; card sort with justification (24 EN/ZH cards).
- Mediation: the same event cropped, framed and captioned three ways.
- Denotation-only writing modeled live, with ESL sentence frames.
- C1 groundwork: blog set-up homework; EN/ZH lexicon opened (≥5 entries by Friday).