Academics

Middle School : Language Arts, English

Facility with language enables students to go beyond the limits of their immediate experience. But to develop facility with language, students must learn to reason as they try to understand, compose, and communicate meaning. Actual learning emerges from reflection upon reading, lectures, or discussions. Learning experiences in language arts must strengthen the powerful and uniquely human connection between thought and language.

Thought and language are our essential tools for learning and communicating. We use language and logic when we listen, make observations, and remember experiences. We use language and logic when we think critically and creatively and when we convey our ideas and feelings to others. All discourse is dependent on thought and language working together.

Students learn to think purposefully in classrooms in which teachers model strategies for solving problems while reading and researching. They encourage students to develop their own techniques for figuring out unknown words and remembering facts and information. They suggest ways that students can focus, plan, assess, and modify their responses to assignments or problems posed in class.

Guidelines for the Language Arts Curriculum

• The language arts curriculum develops thinking and language together through interactive learning.
• The language arts curriculum develops children's oral language and early literacy through interactive learning.
• The language arts curriculum draws on literature from many genres, time periods, and cultures, featuring works that reflect our common literary heritage.
• Writing as an essential way to develop, clarify, and communicate ideas in persuasive, expository, literary, and expressive discourse.
• An effective language arts curriculum provides for literacy in all forms of media.
• Skills instruction should be taught in meaningful context.
• An effective language arts curriculum teaches the strategies necessary for acquiring academic knowledge, achieving common academic standards, and attaining independence in learning.
• The language arts curriculum builds on the language, experiences, and interests that students bring to school.
• Language arts curriculum should develop each student's distinctive writing and speaking voice.
• While encouraging respect for differences in home backgrounds, the language arts curriculum nurtures students' sense of their common ground as present or future American citizens in order to prepare them for responsible participation in our schools and democratic life.