Assignment #1

Assignment #1

Understanding ELA Instruction

After reading this week articles, I found that the Common Core State Standards for ELA and Literacy in Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects “represent the next generation of K-12 standards designed to prepare all students for success in college, career, and life by the time they graduate from high school.” It is nice to see that the standards are being aimed for not only for succeeding in school, but are being designed for a student’s success in life and profession. Students need to be prepared to read, write, speak, listen, and use language effectively. I found that in the middle grades, English language arts change radically and that children learn to read in elementary school and read to learn in middle school.

The four key features to teach language arts are reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language.

·       Reading: Text complexity and the growth of comprehension.

Students must ultimately show a growing ability to absorb more and make use of certain texts where they can make connections between different texts.

·       Writing: Text types, responding to reading, and research.

The writing standards acknowledge that some writing skills are applicable to many types of writing. These skills include the ability to plan, revise, edit, and publish. Specific writing types include arguments, informative/explanatory texts, and narratives. It is important that students make connections between reading and writing and can write about evidence obtained from literary and informational texts.

·       Speaking and Listening: Flexible communication and collaboration.

The speaking and listening standards include skills necessary for formal presentations. Students must develop skills for oral communication and interpersonal skills. A lot of important common abilities come away from this standard including working together, expressing and listening carefully to ideas, integrating information from oral, visual, quantitate, and media sources, evaluating what is heard, and adapting to speech to context and task. These abilities are important not only in the school system, but in the professional and business world as well.

·       Language: Conventions, effective use, and vocabulary.

The language standard focuses on the conventions of writing that include mechanics, usage, and sentence formation. Mechanics could include spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphs. Usage refers to word order, verb tense, and subject-verb agreement. Sentence formation refers to the structure of sentences and the way that simple and complex sentences are formed. The effective use of language is a very important skill to learn because if language is not used in an effective way and attention is not on proper word choice, communication is interrupted.