English
The English language arts form the foundation for effective communication. The ability to construct meaning through reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and the process of inquiring as well as the ability to present ideas through writing, speaking, and visual media are the bases of English language arts. These skills, essential to the health of our democracy and the quality of our culture, have become ever more important with the modern explosion of modern communication media. Effective communication is critical regardless of the devices used or the distances over which we are communicating.
The study of language helps students to control their lives and become more effective thinkers through communication, reflection, and understanding. To develop good thinking strategies, students must become engaged as active learners. To help them improve, students need to practice English language arts skills and receive frequent feedback across all areas of study. Parents, teachers, and other adults must encourage the interest in language that students bring with them when they first enter school. Collectively, the English language arts constitute both a discipline in its own right, like mathematics or science, and a means of communicating about all other disciplines. Without a command of these English language arts, it is difficult to think about, understand, or explain other disciplines.
Literacy Skills Across the Content Areas - The English Language Arts Standards describe the knowledge and skills all students need to be successful. These skills are important for career, college, and citizenship. These skills are also essential as students progress through their Pre-K-Diploma experience for accessing and sharing knowledge across content areas. Schools and teachers must take particular care to support and hold students accountable for the application of the performance indicators related to research, analysis of media, informational/position-taking writing, informational reading, listening, and speaking, where applicable, across all content areas. Maine’s business community and higher education institutions have formally and informally underscored this need for effective communication and cross-content literacy.
Research – Research is an essential skill for success in the workplace, in college, and in life. All students should be able to locate information to support decisions and answer questions. Schools must ensure that the skills and knowledge of research are applied in all content areas.
Reading and Writing Processes - The English Language Arts Standards attempt to present the processes of reading, writing and the varied genres related to the two in a clear, concise format. This approach may create the misperception that these aspects of English language arts are linear and entirely discrete whereas they are often dynamic, iterative processes and sometimes overlapping constructs. Schools and teachers must recognize and accommodate this complexity in their student instruction.
Text Complexity - The use of reading standards is incomplete without a consideration of text complexity. The standards explain the knowledge and skills of reading. Text complexity provides a common understanding of the difficulty of the reading material to which the standards are applied. A grade appropriate span of text complexity can be determined in various ways including the use of reading lists, teacher judgment, and other standardized measures. An understanding of a student’s reading ability, as defined by the text complexity that the student can successfully comprehend, is an important diagnostic tool for teachers as they work to advance the student’s skills and ability to use those skills with increasingly complex texts. There are a number of variables that contribute to the complexity of any text including word difficulty, sentence complexity, familiarity of content, required background knowledge, organization of the text, unity of the writing, quality and rigor of the writing, and text length. The goal of the Maine Learning Results is to ensure that all students can read and comprehend texts that reflect the text complexity required for career, college, and citizenship.
Grade Appropriate Span of Text Complexity - The phrase grade appropriate span of text complexity refers to the range of complexity appropriate for the identified grade or grade span.
OUTLINE OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS STANDARDS AND PERFORMANCE INDICATOR LABELS
A. Reading
1. Interconnected Elements: Comprehension, Vocabulary, Alphabetics, Fluency
2. Literary Texts
3. Informational Texts
4. Persuasive Texts
B. Writing
1. Interconnected Elements
2. Narrative
3. Argument/Analysis
4. Persuasive
5. Practical Application
C. Research
1. Research
D. Language
1. Grammar and Usage
2. Mechanics
E. Listening and Speaking
1. Listening
2. Speaking
F. Media
1. Analysis of Media
(Maine Learning Results, 2007)